Guidelines for EduBlogging September 30, 2008
Posted by eingang in Teaching.Tags: blogging, edublogging, planetou, public disclosure, week1
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The new Open University H810 course (Accessible Online Learning: Supporting Disabled Students) incorporates blogging into its assessment and teaching practices as a way of encouraging self-reflection and encouraging engagement with issues raised in the course. However, many students are new to blogging and may not realize how public their postings will be. In an age where employees can be fired or disciplined for their personal blog postings and recruitment agencies scour the web looking for inappropriate behaviour, I thought it would be prudent to provide some guidelines about writing in the public blogosphere. I came up initially with five:
- If it’s about you, don’t post anything you’d be embarrassed to have your grandmother read.
- Be wary about disclosing your (or anyone else’s!) personal details that would enable someone to find them in the real world: home addresses, phone numbers, etc.
- If you’re writing about where you work, consider anonymising the company or using a code name instead.
- If you’re writing about people you work with or specific people at your institution, consider referring to them by their job title instead of by their name.
- If you’re writing about a specific student, it’s best to write about them in a general way rather than by using their real name. Code names or aliases can be a good way to go.
I was primarily concerned with the disclosure of too much identifying information and not with my students posting defamatory content or corporate secrets. Those are also valid concerns, however, and are covered more at length in the following interesting articles:
- Lessons Learned from Google Blogger Who Got Fired: InformationWeek article from February 16th, 2005 with five lessons learned from the very public firing of Mark Jen from Google eleven days after starting.
- Beware – Blogging Can Get You Fired: article posted by a Oracle consultant firm about the dangers of blogging and the legal position of bloggers for things they post in the UK or the USA.
Remember: a blog post can live forever.
Just bookmarked this great post and will share with colleagues and students. As a possible bookend or related item, I wrote a similar post about “using social media responsibly” for students in my professional industry college courses. I’ve linked my name (here) back to that piece. Cheers!