Christie Mason

Publishing URLs within an educational system and telling students you are publishing their links is one situation. Publishing links to assignments that are completed for a class to the outside world is a different situation. What I do not see is alerting students to the possibility that links to their blogs will be distributed outside their specific educational entity.  They may not "care" or they may care very much.

Back in the old days, I would accept that other instructors might see any paper I wrote. If the instructor intended to publish it for other students to read, then I was always informed and implied consent by not objecting.   But, if the instructor had started making copies and giving them to anyone they encountered all over the world, I would not have felt that was appropriate.  Consenting to sharing within on sphere does not imply consent to a larger sphere.

The other issue that I see is the infinite life of the Internet. Politicians & executives today have been known to regret taped remembrancesof their passionate college viewpoints. When you are college age, you just cannot conceive that you may change your mind, or even be embarrassed by the beliefs you feel so closely committed to today.    What's written into the web, especially since it sounds like most of you are using public services on public web servers,  today can ripple infinitely by being cached and indexed and resaved in other ways and other systems.  I think it may be entirely possible that a future journalist, HR person or anyone else could dig the web and find these blog assignments.  How many of you would want to see your college class assignments Googled today?

I'm looking at all the links to student's thoughts and wonder what type of expectations these students have about the privacy of their thoughts?  In an odd way the web offers a type of anonymity because it is an ocean of words.  It can also create environments that feel secluded and private, where students may forget that they're not just creating a paper for a class assignment  Those  thoughts will be available to the whole world for the rest of their life, and perhaps even beyond. 

Instructors - Did you set an expectation with your students that you would be sharing links to their thoughts with other groups?  Or, because frameworks like LJ are not password protected - do the student have full realization that their thoughts will be available to the world - to infinity ("and beyond" as Buzz Lightyear would say)?

Christie Mason

Well Liz you caught me wondering if Sylvia was making a point about dumping info vs exchanging knowledge by removing all contextual format and organization.

When I first started working with static HTML pages, I would play around with making text carry more meaning through odd formats such as
  Indenting a sentence
      to show a secondary,
           then a next level thought.

or introducing hard paragraph breaks so that a
   sentence would demand
         more attention
   depending on how it was
              spaced.

Christie Mason

That text file is not very easy to read, can you post something that has a bit more formatting in it?

Thank you,
Christie Mason

Thank you Sylvia for doing that.

I've often wondered why course/learner management systems often break  standards, compliance has many definitions, and are not accessible.  It seems like the most popular systems tend to have the most problems and I wonder why people buy into them.

Perhaps it's because accessiblity is not a priority with those that are responsible for selecting these systems?  Or, maybe it's because those people don't know how to judge the reality of vendor claims?  What other factors cause people to select systems that have significant problems in these areas?

I've often yearned for some type of review site for these systems where people could share their experiences with different systems that could be used to verify, or dispute, vendor's generic claims of accessibility.

Does anyone know of any sites that offer the opportunity for that type of input?

Christie Mason