Aug 26 2008
Where has the day gone?!
With the exception of the occasional knock on the door from family and friends and the routine visit to the clothes line, I spent most of Sunday online. I know, I can hear you say – oh Lina, get a life!!! Now that I’ve started students on this blogging journey, I’m finding I have a number of questions that I need to deal with.
My main concern at the moment is to encourage my pre-service education students to engage with the blogging process in an ethical and safe manner in the hope that they can make informed decisions regarding their use in educational contexts. During the initial planning of this unit I questioned whether I should set up the student blogs within our Learning Management System – I decided not to as this restricted access would impact their experience with blogs. Even though these are early days, after reading the students’ initial posts I’m pleased that I made this decision.
Now that I’ve let my students loose in the big wide world I realise the importance of making them aware of behaving ethically online. I found the following sites to be a useful start:
I would really like to know how you tackle the issue of behaving ethically online with your students?
10 responses so far
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Besides the standard issues of copyright and fair use I think Australian students also need to understand that unlike Americans we are not protected by the right to free speak. Perhaps that is a topic that you should discuss with them in terms of what it means to Australian bloggers and what they can/can’t blog about.
Also there are quite a few points that I totally disagree with in Jeanne Kimbal’s article.
Most teachers gradually process the students through introducing them to how they should interact online.
Thank you Sue for the advice. I’m curious – which elements of Jeanne Kimbal’s article do you have an issue with? After spending some time in the US I know how attitudes and regulations differ.
Lina
Majority of her article I agree with but not these two points:
1) Avoid blogging sites and software that are open to anyone because your students will be corresponding with unknown people.
2) Don’t publish links to outside Web sites on your students’ blog pages unless the links are with well-established organizations.
Basically the first point about avoiding blogging sites implies to me that she is suggesting using private blogs (only added users can see posts) which means students miss out on all aspects of global collaboration. You can put mechanism in place to ensure that all comments are moderated through the educator.
I guess its one thing to have rules and a completely different matter for people to not only use their common sense but to also follow these guidelines…
Its not enough to assume that people will find such information for themselves, maybe it needs to be more readily available and advertised in general.
@Sue, to be honest I was quite concerned about the global exposure aspect of blogs but after interacting with you and the blogging process I feel that this IS the greatest power of blogs. I am now aware that you can ‘control’ the blog environment if you need to.
@Hayley, yes I agree – we can’t assume that people are going to use common sense. I think as educators it is our responsibility to make students aware of the guidelines – this often involves explicit teaching.
I agree Lina; I tend to sit down at 8 30am to do w whole day’s work and then spend 5 hours on Facebook. There’s so many distractions, and thats all I can think about whenever the idea of extravagent uses of technology in classrooms. How can we accout for all examples of sytems abuse on the students’ behalves when we havn’t ebcounterd them all yet, with new examples cropping up all the time? I suppose we just do the best we can.
C
Hi Lina,
I’m from America and I’m part of the collaboration nation, (http://collaborationnation.wikispaces.com/).
One of the first weeks of school, my teacher had a huuuge powerpoint-presentation about MySpace. It included MySpaces that students from our team produced, but of course he blocked out the picture and students’ names. He was trying to get the point across that you can learn a whole lot about someone just from looking at what they post online, and that we all use technology so much more than we think.
Check out my blog if you get the chance
,
my URL is http://meghane09.edublogs.org
Hi Meg
Thank you for visiting my blog
– I think we share the same ‘expert’ Sue Waters. She has been helping many of my university students and I call her our very own resident expert.
I have been to America a few times and have always had a wonderful time.
I did a very similar thing as your teacher but instead of using MySpace I asked students to build an electronic collage of all of the technology they normally use – they too were surprised with all of the technology they use. My students have also just started their own blogs and I would agree with your teacher that reading their blogs tells me so much more about what they believe and feel.
Yes I know, Sue is very helpful to me and others in my class for blogging tips.
You’ve been to America? Really? Interesting, I’ve lived in America all my life. Just out of curiousity, where do you live?
When my classmates first were told about the presentation, many of them were nervous. A lot of them put information up onto the Web that really was unnecessary, I don’t think they understood ANYONE from ANYWHERE can read it. Most students that saw their MySpaces pop up were almost, in a way, embarassed! But don’t get me wrong, a lot of the pages in the powerpoint weren’t like that. After the day of the presentation, the students that DID feel as though their MySpace had innapropriate/personal information that was visible to anyone, edited their MySpaces, and learned a very important lesson that will probably help them in future online!
Hi Meg
I live in Perth, Western Australia and have lived here most of my life.
Some of my students did a great presentation on MySpace and FaceBook last week and they looked really closely at the ‘terms of agreement’ that you must agree to prior to establishing your account and most of the students were amazed at some of the ‘terms of agreement’. Most people don’t even bother reading these, they simply agree.