When students enter the public sphere, ethical concerns arise regarding their exposure. This module provides concepts for consideration as well as resources to assist students and faculty when putting material into the world. Much work is not contentious, but occasionally writing goes viral. Many students have published their work without repercussions. The more public, however, the more instructors have to help students negotiate the public sphere.
One way to alleviate such concerns is to keep blogs or public discourse assignments private to the class or to Smith College. ITS can assist you in setting up a blog that is only accessible to class members, or that requires a Smith username and password to view.
Ethical concerns may be more pronounced when work is placed online via social media or informal blogs. Formal acceptance for a professional publication, including many professional blogs, involves professional editing and a level of protection under the auspices of the publication.
When talking to students about handling online behavior, this handout from the Union for Concerned Scientists may be helpful (“Science in an Age of Scrutiny”). Even students who are not currently placing work online may benefit from training in handling hostility on social media and digital platforms. The handout, while nominally geared toward science, contains helpful tips for all public writing.
Another resource is Going Public : A Guide for Social Scientists by Arlene Stein and Jessie Daniels. Chapter 6, “The Perils of Going Public,” covers the ground about privacy and ethical concerns very effectively. The book is directed at social scientists but has relevance for all scholarly disciplines.
Questions for Consideration
Privacy concerns
- Privacy considerations: if a class blog is public, the student’s information may be discoverable. We need to respect students who are concerned about privacy, and to protect that rare student who is trying to keep out of the eyes of an abuser or stalker. Aliases are a good idea, but what if they’re really just too scared to be on a public blog? This may be a FERPA issue, too.
- Privacy considerations: social media grabs their information. Are we ok with making them do that, under the auspices of education? In the example of Sara Eddy’s course ENG 119: Consumer Culture: if students post on FB, their information will be sold to marketers, which is exactly what the course tries to get them to be critical of.
Online behavior concerns
- Students’ work may see public comment that is aggressive, mean, trollish, doxxing, etc. Our students are often social justice warriors, and that may mean attracting dissent with provocative language. They may not be ready for the blowback, and we are responsible for making sure they are, or that they’re not put in the position to get it.
- Students know internet language well, and fall easily into colloquial shorthand, and may not represent themselves as well as they could/may get in fights.
- They don’t know who they are yet; they are trying on opinions and ideas. They may say things in a public forum that they won’t believe in 10 or 20 years, and these things could come back to haunt them. Do we bear responsibility for putting them in that position?
Writing concerns
- Their writing may not be ready for prime time: we have to make sure it is, before sending them out into a public arena.
- Grading for assignments like Instagram posts, Tweetstorms, FB threads, Blogs: the expectations for these kinds of writing aren’t as clear as the academic essay. The Jacobson Center is currently in progress on creating rubrics for public discourse assignments. We welcome input and examples from faculty who have developed similar rubrics.
- Ethically, is it right for us to devote time in a writing class to learning how to tweet? Or do we have a higher duty to paragraph structure and thesis statements?
Class issues
- Our students do not come to this equally prepared, and many may not have had access to the technology in their high schools that they’ll be using: how do we account for the varied levels of comfort and the sharp learning curve? How do we prevent some of them looking like novices, because they’re just starting out?
- How do we adjust grades given the unequal levels of preparedness coming out of their high school experiences?