Forum .LRN Q&A: Community building vs. privacy in online learning

Carl Bleusius made these interesting points in another thread:

"If I am in a class with you I want to be able to list all contributions you have made to the class so I can get a feel for who I am talking with (in other words, being able to list class contributions of an individual should not be limited to the professor).

"We must not forget that students need to be protected. Should contributions be limited to the audience it would reach in a traditional learning situation (I might not want my professor in Medical Ethics hearing what I said in my Philosophy course last year)? Should the student decide (I might need to remove the evidence... after posting something really stupid)? The best solution might be to link the "about me" view permissions with the context of the contribution (if bboard is only viewable by users in course X... all users registered in course X should be able to see a listing of my contributions in that course on my "about me" page). I get the feeling it is just boils down to where we put the switches (the infrastructure seems to be in place)."

IMHO, there are two critical insights here that are somewhat in tension with each other. On the one hand, it's important to enable students to easily get to know each other, particularly in a pure distance learning context where they may never see each other face-to-face. I always have believed that the directory feature dating back to the original ACS, where you can see every contribution that a community member has ever made, is absolutely one of the most valuable features of ACS of any version or flavor.

OTOH, student privacy is also critical, not only for the traditional reasons associated with the Internet but also because privacy is an essential part making a class conversation safe enough for students to take risks and really speak their minds.

So any online educational community needs three elements: (1) controls that let the institution enforce privacy policies, (2) controls that let students make individual privacy choices (bounded by the institutional choices above), and (3) a written policy that helps guide individuals on how to use the privacy controls. (I might add that there are times when an individual instructor needs to set privacy policies, too. Sometimes s/he may want to deliberately create a safe haven, while other times s/he may want to require students to speak out and share.) Note that the settings that the system allows necessarily shapes the possible privacy policies.

So this is a critical conversation that the dotLRN community must have. What is the possible range of privacy policies? What choices do we want to make possible at the institutional, the class, and the individual levels? It seems to me that some global philosophical decisions should be made here and then incorporated into dotLRN in a consistent and principled way.

Michael, I also strongly feel that the feature allowing others to see all contributions an individual has made as one of the most valuable features of ACS of any version or flavor. We are making a mistake if this is not included in dotLRN. I think it is of utmost importance that we define the scope of this feature carefully for dotLRN.

Michael, I argue that these philosophical questions have been answered in the past and must not be discussed... but emphasized and documented. To support my argument I call forward the Cs: aCs, openaCs, aCes, and dotCrn ;)

Community is based on a group of individuals where members are known to other members of the group. To promote community there must be a way for members to get to know one another. A community suffers, when it is hard to get to know others in the group quickly and efficiently.

As far as legal issues and privacy go, the best bet is to support previously existing closed groups (classes) with virtual collaboration and communication spaces, a virtual commons for each group if you will. The publication scope of contributions in each commons should be made clear by the group leaders (e.g. group admin) or the context in which contributions are made. This is how it works with our present platform... if external parties are going to be given access to contributions made in a class this must be made clear from the start. One thing that occurs often here in Heidelberg is that high quality group presentations might be posted outside of the course after completion (the professors do notify the students beforehand).

Students must be prepared for the transparency which comes with interconnectivity... for a world where it is becoming very difficult to act anonymously and avoid accountability for actions. "Think before you speak", is what common sense tells us... and sometimes lack of common sense can be compensated by experience (I like to think of universities and other learning spaces as sheltered havens to gain not only knowledge, but experience). Where possible the privacy issue should be delegated to the group leaders or the individuals themselves.

As an example, let me describe a situation I ran into while I was the instructional designer on one online class where a prominent professor taught his investment analysis ideas to some employees at a large financial services firm. The class involved group project work that necessarily included data about customers and possibly new and proprietary business ideas that came out of groups. To make matters more complicated, the professor was occasionally hired by the firm's competitors as a consultant and wanted to be sure (to his credit) that he didn't inadvertently walk away with an idea that emerged from the class which could be fairly considered property of the firm.

As a result, we decided to create subgroup workspaces where even the professor did not have access. The students themselves decided what could be shared with the class (and the professor) and published sanitized versions of their ideas and examples to the class. In turn, there was another set of rules for what could go from the class to the outside world.

Communities are fundamentally ideosynchratic based on the needs of their members. Therefore, the balance between sharing and privacy is also fundamentally ideosyncratic. We need to come up with a range of use cases and make sure our architecture makes it easy to accomodate those use cases.