Scholarly Life of a Committed Technofile

I’ve decided that I love having bankers, or people that work for banks, in my classes. They always point out various “security” glitches with the technologies I’m using. A few years back a colleague and I did usability testing on our online courses. After one session the student (a banker) when to log out of the course management system…oops, our campus IT folks had not built that option into our instance of the system.

Lately I’ve been playing around with a lot of “social” technologies, specifically blogs, bookmarking, and portals. And for me to see what the students are doing, I require that they make them “live” or “public.” Well, I have another banker this semester, and he is very uncomfortable about that. And obviously, there are also the issues with student privacy. I said no problem! I knew that we could “share” our bookmarking and pageflakes accounts. I also knew that I had seen a privacy/password option in one of the blogging systems. Of course, the privacy option was not in the system I had selected to test run with his section, so he is odd man out with another blogging tool. However, I’m also now test-running the “sharing” versus “public” functions in all these tools.

Ultimately I think this is good for two reasons. One, if a student is really uncomfortable, I want them to still be able to participate in the class. Granted, at this other students can not benefit, nor comment, on his work; however, if I required all students to share, instead of going public, it would resolve the problem. And the second reason? Back to student privacy rights; however, I think it is important to interegate this issue a bit. If you believe in social constructivist theories of learning it requires that students interact with one another, one another’s ideas, and one another’s work. Any writing class that uses peer review does not keep all student “private.”