Whether you choose to teach it in your classes or not, it’s important that you as an instructor exercise critical literacy in relation to the technology you have your students use. These are some of the ethical issues I see in the implementation of blogs in a classroom setting. It’s important to realize that by asking your students to put their writing on a public space, you’re asking a lot from them.
I think that the wider, non-academic audience implied by a public blogging site is worth the risks it incurs to students’ privacy, and many other educators agree. But when students put their writing in the public sphere, they should be aware that their writing is exposed for examination by people other than their instructor and their peers. Because student posts are often much more personal than their formal essays (I’ve had students post on their parents’ divorce, trying to quit smoking, masturbation, and difficult issues in other classes), they should know that what they write does not have the same, finite audience as their formal essays.
In particular, students should be aware of Google’s cache system, which will archive their blog site, even after it is taken down from the web. This means that once they have posted to their site, their words have been inscribed in the ether of the web, and are subject to being excavated even 10 or possibly 100 years from now. Our students are generally young, and may not be fully aware of the implications of the permanence of their words. Mike Shapiro reminds students that plagiarism can go both ways once their writing is public; they are subject to have their words appropriated in ways they have not endorsed. What if they post on a politically provocative topic, and a potential employer 10 years from now Googles them and discovers their thoughts at the time? What if, as happened in my class, a student posts on a religious topic and incites someone from an interested group to criticize her stance on the issue she has raised? What if this criticism becomes insulting or violent? We can control the discourse in our own classes to a certain degree, but once our students’ writings are released on the web, we cannot control the potential offense of language used to respond to them.
Students may feel exposed by putting their thoughts in writing on the web, but there is also a risk in that we may think we know our students better than we actually do from their blog posts. Every instructor who writes about blogs (including me!) writes about how great it is to get to know students through their blogs. We should not, however, assume we know our students better than we do. Jill Walker notes that what she posts in public on her blog does not allow for the different relationships she has with readers on her site, who may be strangers, family or close friends: “Blogging does not allow for the changes in roles we’re used to in different relationships… Although 99% of my life is unblogged, these people think that they know me.” (Blogging from Inside the Ivory Tower, 2006, in press). Our students’ blogs are unlikely to become as popular as jill/txt, but students should be aware of the issues in addressing multiple audiences publicly on blogs.
We should also be cautious about how encouraging we are with this technology. Some instructors (including, I think, Stephen Krause) introduce blogs with the idea that this form of writing on the web is liberating. Genre is more open, publishing is democratic, and speech is truly free. But when students are blogging for a class, these assets of blogs in the real world are not in place. Jill Walker asks, “how liberating is it to be forced to blog?” Educational bloggers Downes and Richardson also warn of this deceptive ideology of blogs.
Contrary to their supposedly democratic nature in the larger blogosphere, blogs can also increase inequalities within our classroom. Some student blogs may be more popular than others, for instance. This may be no different from some students’ comments being better received in discussion than others’, but it may play out differently in blogs. For instance, it may be much easier for a student to notice that he has (0) comments on his blog than to notice that his comments are taken up in class discussion. Or on Matt Barton’s class blog site, a student can see how her blog stacks up to her peers. Is this encouragement to write more interesting posts? Or frustrating to students whose blogs are less read?
While my student surveys indicate that few of them had trouble with the technology of setting up a blog on Blogger, students less comfortable with the technology of blogs may be less comfortable with the writing done on them. Instead of breaking down a digital divide in our classes by teaching them all how to use blogging technology, we could be exacerbating it by rewarding more technologically literate students.
Although there are risks involved in allowing students to make their writing public, there are ways instructors can help students mitigate some of the risks:
If instructors enact their ethical obligation to inform their students of the risks of writing in public and if they allow students to choose to do so freely, then their public writing can be an enjoyable and pedagogically rich experience.