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"More on teaching and blogs"
09/30/2003 Entry
[I am now posting entries at Crooked Timber. See this post - including follow-up comments - there.]
A couple of weeks ago Henry posted an entry about blogs and teaching, or perhaps more broadly about the (potential) role of blogs in academia.
In the meantime, I’ve been having discussions with people at Northwestern’s Academic Technologies about the use of blogs here on campus. During these discussions, an interesting point came up that has some implications for the use of blogs in teaching. Apparently, it is illegal for a university to disclose information about who is enrolled in a course. When I asked for the legal basis of this, I was pointed to the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act. Reading that document, I can’t say this becomes obvious. But if it is the case then it has implications for requiring students to participate in world-accessible blogs. If we require students to maintain a blog or post to a central blog then we are making their course enrollment public.
In light of this policy, it seems blogs that require students to post in the context of a course cannot be public. And if teaching blogs cannot be public then I think they lose much of what makes them more interesting than a discussion thread for the purposes of teaching. As someone noted, it is exciting and educational for students to learn that some of the authors they discuss are real-live people out there who may stumble upon their comments. Students may then take the material more seriously and pay more attention to how they comment about issues. However, if a blog cannot be public then this won’t happen. So at that point, what distinguishes a blog from the combination of a message thread and a course Web page?
Replies: 2 Comments have been posted, click here to see them and add your own
Nice Blog
Posted by Tesine @ 02/23/2004 12:34 PM CST
Nice Blog
Posted by Tesine @ 02/23/2004 12:35 PM CST
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