Notes on Privacy From Today’s Class

Here’s a quick recap (posted on the blog for everyone’s convenience) of today’s discussion of student privacy. This discussion occurred, as I noted in my previous post on the subject, because I read a blog post from Josh Honn this past weekend, and that post made me rethink my own teaching habits.

Everyone said that they were currently comfortable with the public-facing course materials we have created together thus far. We talked about why, and some part of that comfort was due to the fact that all of your thesis projects are on topics that already have a large presence online: Colby’s working on someone whose work is widely disseminated across the web, Kerishma’s writing about a series of books that are basically responsible for half of Tumblr even existing to begin with (sorry, I had to go there!), and Laura’s project is engaging with some perennially popular films and stories. There is a sense of safety in being part of a digital crowd, I think; as I said in class, your projects aren’t likely to come up in the first two million search results on any related keywords. Our privacy concerns might be different, were any of you working on topics that appeared online with less frequency.

We also decided, however, that we will not publish your written thesis projects online in their totality, be that in PDF or as pages of a web site project. That’s partly because we want your written theses to serve as material for digital projects, and partly because it seems to all of us to be a relatively ineffective way to present your content, but it also seems to be where we have drawn a line, in terms of what is acceptably public to us and what isn’t. We should revisit this “digital publication question” when it comes to your presentation materials. I would prefer to include your PowerPoints or Prezis (or whatever else we decide to use) on this site, but we can decide upon that after you’ve actually produced said materials.

We also touched on your own work from earlier Macaulay classes that is still visible on our eportfolio system and/or indexed in Google; the general consensus was that some of the stuff you blogged about in the first two years of college wasn’t material you necessarily wanted to share with a potential employer. I suggested that we look at those instances on a case-by-case basis, in individual meetings that we were already going to have this term. My hope is that we can decide together, in each case, what to leave up and what to take down. But I am sensitive to the thought that who you were when you took your NYC Seminars is not who you are now, or who you intend to be going forward. You are members of one of the first graduating classes to have been using the eportfolio system for your entire time at Macaulay; it’s only natural that your 18-year-old self and your 21- or 22-year-old self don’t perfectly align. Frankly, I’d be worried if they did! But we decided that at least for now, we were proud enough of the work we were doing in this class to stay public–with the caveat that we may change our minds in ten years.

I spoke briefly as well about using this site as a calling card–something I’m consciously showing off to potential employers as I seek a new job. It’s important to me to be upfront with all of you about that, so that you know that your writing may be read by people who are looking at this site out of interest in my teaching career. (Not that I don’t love working with all of you! I totally do. But times change, and so must I…)

Finally, I hope it was clear to everyone that the topic of privacy is not a one-and-done conversation. I would like to revisit this question whenever any of you think it is appropriate. And, in the interest of full disclosure, Josh Honn (writer of the original blog post) was curious to hear what came of our conversation; I am going to point him towards this post. Don’t be afraid to comment if I missed anything, or if you have more ideas!