User Type: Student
Platform: Youtube
Activity: Uploading video of speech assignment
Threats: Youtube settings, public/digital identity
Author: Laurie Hurson
Blackboard Discussion
User Type: Faculty
Platform: Blackboard
Activity: Discussion Forums
Considerations:
- Pros/cons to having a public facing site;
- whor owns/manages Blackboard data
- Backing up/retrieving old class data
Google Collaborations
User Type: Student
Platform: Google Docs
Activity: editing shared class document
Threats: Google data policies, clarifying sharing/editing privileges on google drive, who can see what (student to student) and implications for peer review/editing (i.e. establishing online/commenting rapport)
Twitter talk
Jane is required to participate on Twitter in a class discussion during the online meeting time for her hybrid course. By tweeting with the course’s assigned hashtag, her professor and her classmates can see her contribution by clicking on that hashtag. However, Jane also uses her Twitter account for personal use and she doesn’t want her professor or her classmates to see her tweets. What should she do?
- User Type: Student
- Platform: Twitter
- Activity: participating in class discussion via a hashtag
- Considerations: The easiest thing for Jane to do would be to create a separate Twitter account and tweet with that account using the class hashtag. If she notifies her professor of her new Twitter identity privately, she can retain the privacy associated with her personal handle. However, the professor should also consider the pros and cons of asking students to participate on social media. How does Twitter, more than another platform, serve the needs of the course. Twitter can be a particularly incendiary and fractious platform for conversation so the rationale for using it in a course should be directly related to learning goals. Perhaps students are engaging in a larger public conversation about transportation in NYC, or maybe they will be using the platform to share their own ideas for improvements to our voting system. The Twitter might function as a reasonable platform for outreach and conversation. Professor Jesse Stommel has used twitter in his classes and has written a how-to guide for Teaching with Twitter. However, he has recently become weary about abuse on the platform outweighing the pedagogical possibilities.
Weekly Blogging
Prof. Smith plans to have students blog about course content on the site she created on the college’s WordPress installation. She has made sure students know how to join the course blog site and she provided documentation on how to “post”. Students will be asked to respond to the reading each week on the course blog.
- User Type: Faculty
- Platform: School-supported, open source WordPress installation
- Activity: collecting student writing via blog
- Considerations: Because the site is owned and run by the school, there are less data collection concerns in this scenario than others. A primary concern for anyone using a blogging platform is students sharing personal information and reflections. Prof. Smith should make it clear to students that their usernames don’t need to be their real names. Students should be made aware whether or not the site is “public” to anyone or if the site will only be visible to the class or university. Professor Smith can decide whether or not to make the site public or private, or she could have a conversation with the class to determine how students feel about sharing their work with a larger audience. If Prof. Smith is having students write about personal subjects it is suggested that she make the site private to the class so that the site can be a personal, welcoming space for students to share.
