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I want to put you into the middle of a conversation that I’ve been having with myself and the media for almost four years now by putting you in the middle of a conversation that’s been running on Mark Glaser’s PBS blog, MediaShift. In an entry posted today (that I learned about from Tim), Mark continues the story of Alana, a student in a journalism course at NYU who has been blogging her class. Mark brings us into the story:
After New York University journalism student Alana Taylor wrote her first embed report for MediaShift on September 5, it didn’t take long for her scathing criticism of NYU to spread around the web and stir conversations. Taylor thought that her professor, Mary Quigley, was not up to speed on social media and podcasting — even though the class she was teaching was called “Reporting Gen Y.” And Taylor felt that NYU was not offering her enough classes about new media; she cited the requirement that students bring print editions of the New York Times to class as one example of their outdated mindset.
Not surprisingly, Quigley was not happy with the story and was upset that Taylor had not sought permission to write her first-person report about the class, and told Taylor it was an invasion of privacy to other students in the class. By Taylor’s account, Quigley had a one-on-one meeting with Taylor to discuss the article, and Quigley made it clear that Taylor was not to blog, Twitter or write about the class again. That was upsetting to Taylor, who had been planning a follow-up report for MediaShift that would include Quigley’s viewpoint and interviews with faculty.
What follows in Glaser’s post is a very thorough examination of the issue and the specifics of policy at NYU and the opinions of several of the journalists and teachers involved in the events, as well as some other thoughtful commentary, especially the commentary from Floyd Abrams, whom Glasner labels as “a veteran media lawyer who has argued First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court.” Abrams, asked if he felt blogging a university class would violate the privacy of other students in the class, answered:
My own view is that while student commentary that is critical of ongoing classes can lead to a level of tension in class at the same time it makes extremely difficult a teacher-student relationship…it does not violate the ‘privacy’ of the classroom and should not be banned or punished. Would it be illegal to do so? It certainly wouldn’t be unconstitutional since NYU isn’t a state school and thus subject to First Amendment limitations. Whether it violates NYU rules I have no idea. I would be very surprised, however, if NYU permitted a student to be punished for writing such a critique. Surprised and disappointed.
The comments to the post are getting quite interesting, too, as journalists and teachers hash out the place of social media like Twitter and blogs in the university classroom, specifically as tools for teaching and practicing journalism.
I’d strongly encourage you to read Glasner’s post, the original piece by Alana Taylor, and the comments showing up in both places, as well as on other sites. They’re continuing to complicate for me the nature of a classroom, whether it is a public space, a private space, or some funky hybrid that exists in between.
While university classrooms, where the students are adults, are different from K-12 classrooms, I continue to think about the nature of classroom spaces and discourse, and the stance that public educators should be taking in regards to the environment that we’re finding ourselves in these days, where students are plugged in and networked via devices that we have no control over. More and more, students are literally bringing their own networks and publishing platforms with them to school. And that means the nature of classroom spaces will continue to become more public, whether or not we want them to.
This isn’t a new issue, but I find the fact that journalists and media folk are stuck in the middle of the same mess as the rest of us both reassuring and frustrating.
So here’re a few of my (continuing) questions:
- In a world where the tools and the access are no longer (and probably never really were) within the control of “us,” the educators, what limits do we set on their use at school that actually begin to balance students’ rights to communicate and reflect and process with the legitimate educational and institutional need to control some of what is and isn’t “public” information?
- How do we balance minors’ needs with the fact that we work for public institutions and should be open to public oversight?
- How does transparency mesh with some of the more delicate issues in the classroom?
- Where do students’ rights to talk about their experiences begin to conflict with other students’ right to privacy?
- Are public school classrooms fundamentally public spaces or private ones? (Or that funky hybrid in-between?)
Blanket bans of personal technology or of writing about certain situations or classes don’t and won’t address these needs in a meaningful and educational relevant way. We need to be thoughtful now about how we teach students to share as the ability to do so becomes even more pervasive in society than it already is. If I’ve learned anything in the last few years, it’s that there are no easy answers here. And for the most part, we’re dodging the questions at school.
I’ll share some of my thoughts about how we might proceed in a future post.
In this podcast, recorded Friday, I talk a little bit about NotK12Online, the fine folks who will be helping me to put it together, some of my/our initial ideas, and the juicy paradox of the whole endeavour. I’ve got a great committee of folks assembled to do the beginning planning - but we’ll need plenty of help. Below are links to the NotK12Online planning committee. We’re all eager for your ideas, input and suggestions regarding NotK12Online. It’s new. It’s different. It’s a walking contradictory paradox. I love it. Please contact us via the various communication links below:
Twitter - jackieb
e-mail - jackie.ballarini AT gmail.com
Twitter - wbass3
e-mail - bbass3 AT gmail.com
Twitter - ecram3
e-mail - ecram3 AT gmail.com
Twitter - budtheteacher
e-mail - budtheteacher AT gmail.com
Today's Chronicle had an article on the Open Humanities Press. One of the board members is Stephen Greenblatt, who as MLA president wrote an influential letter on the coming crisis in scholarly publishing.
I’m writing this morning from the National Writing Project’s web presence working retreat, an event I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with as a facilitator since its inception last year. This is the second time we’ve run the event, which is an attempt to provide some time and structure for teams from writing project sites who wish to think strategically about their web presence. We’ll spend the weekend thinking through the identity of our respective organizations and what we can do online to both reflect and support that identity and the good work that all of us are trying to do in our various locations around writing and teaching and learning. That means lots of things to lots of people, but there’s plenty of intersection in the general trends.
The event is pretty intense, and, while designed for sites to think about their organizational web presences, is very helpful to me as I think about my personal and professional life online. One of the big questions that we’re asking people to think about is how their web presences are a reflection of and a lens into their work. My personal web presence should be like that, too. But I’m not sure that it is. I’ve got content spread around the web in a variety of places, everywhere from Flickr to Twitter to this blog to my wiki (which is desperately in need of an update or seven) to my work with other groups and schools and people. There’s plenty of personal mixed in with the professional, and I think the boundaries between those two areas of my life, never truly separate in “real, offline” life, continue to blur and fade and shift from day to day, week to week, month to year. (That’s a good thing, I think, for the most part.) How do I, as a blogger and a teacher and a learner and a father and a husband and a citizen, do my best to ensure a consistent presence across the Internet that reflects what I believe to be important? Just as essential - how do I bring all of that content that sits all over the place into some sort of a coherent whole? Or do I need to, so long as all that content in all of those places, and others, reflects the message(s) that I want so desperately to convey - that learning and writing and thinking and engaging and passionately working for the benefit of others are essential habits and skills for everyone, regardless of background, culture, or profession?
I think, too, about what “web presence” means. Having a presence and creating a presence are not necessarily the same thing. Being and doing aren’t necessarily the same, either.
These are some of my thoughts as I head into a pretty intensive planning process, where, if last year is any indication, I’ll learn as much, and probably a great deal more, than I’m hoping to facilitate. This summer, I’ll be doing a three-hour session on presence tools, a class of software that are about making one’s presence known in some formal and informal ways, Twitter being one of the tools that I’m most curious about at the moment. I also would like to explore more about digital identity, a conversation I sort of started here a little while back. My work this weekend will continue to influence that work. Lots to learn. Luckily, I’ve got plenty of smart folks here to learn from and with. We should all be so lucky.
I wonder if there’s a button with the slogan “I surf an unfiltered Internet,” or “I read filtered blogs.” Maybe “I read blocked blogs,” is better - more alliterative.
Along another line, perhaps a button with the message “I’d trust my kids in Al Upton’s classroom,” would be a good slogan, too.
Any graphic artists out there? I’ll buy in bulk.
A little while back, Dean mentioned a tweet I made that got him thinking. I'm still thinking - about what's already out there and what we can learn from it, instead of racing forward to the next new thing in a hurry. I feel myself skating from content to content and application to application - without enough time to process, to understand. To learn. Frustrated with myself, I'm finding myself deep in the archives of bloggers that I trust and respect at the moment, looking for . . . well, I'm not sure what, but I think it's important. I've much more to say about that - but in the meantime, here's a blast from someone else's past. I found this line delicious:
I’ve got weblog fever in a bad way, and I know JUST enough about
making them work to make them dangerously intriguing.
The author? Will Richardson. August 2002.