Group items tagged

Most students don't care about FERPA - stuffy administrators do. If students cared in the slightest none of them would have Facebook accounts. Have them sign a FERPA waiver and get back to work! If they don't want to waive then provide alternate ways to earn credit.

I think it is really important to keep the spaces where we learn private. Students need to ability to test out ideas within a safe environment that is protected from outside search engines. We need an opportunity to test ideas and fail without a future prospective employer able to access student work. Materials that are public in the digital world lose their contextual basis and therefore can be misinterpreted at a later time.  Therefore, if I have students post and reflect, I do it all within the confines of a password protected website. Password protection is not perfect but at least it is an honest step at protecting a student's right to be a student.

Most of the students were quite awkward in their initial blogging. Good students all, the class was a seminar on "Designing for Effective Change" for the Honors Program, but lacking experience in this sort of approach to instruction, the students wrote to their conception of what I wanted to hear from them. I can’t imagine a more constipated mindset for producing interesting prose. For this class there was a need for them to unlearn much of their approach which had been finely tuned and was quite successful in their other classes. They needed to take more responsibility for their choices. While I gave them a prompt each week on which to write, I also gave them the freedom to choose their own topic so long as they could create a tie to the course themes. Upon reading much of the early writing, I admonished many of them to "please themselves" in the writing. I informed them that they could not possibly please other readers if they didn’t first please themselves. It was a message they were not used to hearing.

The commenting, more than any other activity the instructor engages in, demonstrates the instructor’s commitment to the course and to the students. In turn the students, learning to appreciate the value of the comments, start to push themselves in the writing

Is open blogging this way consistent with FERPA? As best as I’ve been able to determine, it is as long as students “opt in

I had my students this fall engage in social bookmarking, earning credit toward their class participation grade for doing so. I made sure to spend at least 10 minutes a week having students share their finds during class time, which means that the students’ finds were integrated with other class discussions and not just some out-of-class “busy work.”

I’ve set up a Diigo group for the course. I’ll invite my students to create Diigo accounts and join the group. In deference to FERPA, I’ll let students choose pseudonyms if they wish, as long as they let me know.

Diigo groups allow group members to comment on and “like” bookmarks shared with the group. These are features that Delicious doesn’t provide, and I’m eager to test them out with students. We live in a participatory culture, and our students expect to be able to interact with content they consume. “Liking” and commenting are interaction tools that my students should be comfortable using given their experiences on Facebook, and these tools should tap into students’ desires for community and sharing quite nicely.