Privacy/Psuedonyms - 90 views
started by Marsh Feldman on 20 Nov 08
started by Marsh Feldman on 20 Nov 08
started by Marsh Feldman on 20 Nov 08
started by Marsh Feldman on 20 Nov 08
When I first signed up for diigo, I was intending to use it only for my own research. I therefore used a pseudonym for my name. Let's suppose my real name is Barak, but I used GeorgeW as my name. I also use the GeorgeW pseudonym on other web sites. As time went on and I became more enamored of diigo, I eventually decided to use it for teaching. My students do web pages as part of my course, and I used diigo highlights and sticky notes to comment on their web pages. Since this is a form of grading, I wanted to keep things private. So I set up separate private groups for each team that created a web page. Once I had graded all the pages, I invited the members of each team to join the corresponding group. Only after the fact did I realize that they will now know I am GeorgeW. I don't so much mind this here, but there are other web sites (not pornography -- get you mind out of the gutter!) where GeorgeW expresses political opinions and other things that I would rather my students not associate with me. Even more importantly, I use the pseudonym on sites where I want to preserve my privacy. Now any student can blow my cover simply by publishing the pseudonym on their blog.
What can I do, and how can I prevent this in the future?
Sorry to hear such a "dilemma" - I sympathize!
But sorry to disappoint, username cannot be changed easily at the moment. We did put up a warning for users to choose their username very carefully as it cannot be changed easily (very tricky backend operation - will impact many databases and can easily messed things up.)
While we might consider adding such a feature eventually (not for a while given our long to-do list), not sure how extensively you have already worked with your students at this point. You might consider checking out the new educator account - www.diigo.com/education which allows you to create student accounts easily. You may wish to start off with a new account and start over again?
By the way, is this k12 or higher ed course that you're teaching?
Joel just mentioned that we may be able to release a feature to allow users to change username soon (probably one or two weeks.) Stay tuned for further update.
If I gained multiple personas, then I might have amongst my dashboard items
* few most recent bookmarks by http://www.diigo.com/user/fuzzy
* few most recent bookmarks by http://www.diigo.com/user/grahamperrin
(AFAIR fuzzy was my previous pseudoynm for which I foolishly forgot the password. That's OT; now in reality I'm happy with the one name.)
Put another way: I might
1. choose a persona at time of bookmarking/highlighting/annotation (select one of two personas from a pull-down menu, or click one of two radio buttons alongside personas)
2. occasionally seek an overview/sense of what has been bookmarked by both personas
Personally, I might choose to offer a public overview of both personas.
Marsh Feldman might have personas 'Teacher Feldman' and 'GeorgeW Feldman' and Marsh Felman would probably enjoy an overview of both personas, whilst never allowling a student to become aware of that overview or the association between personas.
The words "relational databases nightmare" come to mind ;)
I do have an approach to personas that need not bring database administrators to their knees. I should aim to share that approach in a separate topic.
> we may be able to release a feature to allow users to change
> username soon
Please, will Diigo 4 allow this?
Marsh leading by a few years (^o^), please was the "Allow for User Name Change" somehow droped by since then?
I have to transmit my whole collection of Diigo bookmarks with their annotations to someone else.
And I can see no other way to achieve this than giving this person my account, then he simply changes the accounts credentials!
THanks for any ideas