Why the Loon does not assign public social-media use
Librarian Josh Honn wrote a thoughtful and well-considered summary post on the clash between student privacy and the laudable desire to teach students about online environments through experience therein. It captures some of why the Loon never requires social-media activity of her students (caveat: she does sometimes require that they critically examine or seek information from social-media sites), but not all.
She is rather surprised that Honn missed the most obvious threat to student privacy inherent in active social-media use: social-media sites themselves, now that Big Data is an established thing. The Loon, as she must in any self-respecting library program, teaches about privacy (and lack thereof) online and off-; in what conceivable universe would it be ethical for her to require students to compromise their own privacy? Pseudonymy helps, limitedly, where it is available. Any instructor requiring wallet-name-obsessed Google+ (including the popular Hangouts) or Facebook use, however, receives a cold red beady-eyed stare from the Loon.
Other serious concerns besides privacy worry her as well. Students are liable to have very different experiences in social media based on factors they may control (interest in technology, for example, or religion) and factors they do not (age, gender, sexual orientation, race). The Loon does not feel comfortable sending any of her students into what may well feel like a whirling buzz saw. Not good pedagogy. (Wikipedia, the Loon is talking to you. Not only you, but definitely you.) Even asking them for passive use feels not-quite-right sometimes, honestly, even with the trigger warnings the Loon is careful to issue.
The creepy-treehouse effect is also worth considering. Some of the Boring Alter Ego’s students follow the BAE’s Twitter account. The Loon seriously considered blocking them at one point… but not only would that take more attention than the Loon cares to expend, it would certainly be experienced as hostile, which is not how the Loon means it. Anyway, depending on how students organize their online selves, requiring that they do classwork with those selves could expose them to their classmates and their instructor in enormously problematic ways.
The last reason the Loon eschews active social-media use in her classroom has to do with the contours of the library and archive professions. Jenica Rogers explains this marvelously well (see narration on slides 13 and 17 particularly), so the Loon will not repeat. The long and short of it is, given current extremely uptight attitudes toward social media among most librarians and archivists, and many employers’ desire for conformity to white middle-class “respectability” norms among employees (just read Hiring Librarians for a while if you do not believe the Loon on this one), requiring social-media use could give students opportunity to destroy their careers before they even start. Certain specialties are even more vulnerable—anyone wanting a career in schools or youth services, for example. Part of the Loon’s job is preventing such implosions!
How likely is this? Well… the Loon’s taught a few students she’d worry about, to be honest. Not many, but isn’t one implosion too many? Especially given that some of the most vulnerable to inadvertent online error will be those with the least online experience, who are likely to cluster among already-vulnerable populations?
If there’s a way to prevent implosions through explicit instruction, the Loon doesn’t know what it is, and frankly doesn’t think it exists, especially in the context of a single rushed semester.
The BAE can’t avoid teaching the topic, of course. She gives a fairly tame assignment asking students to evaluate various social-media tools for certain specific purposes and workplaces. She talks about uses, risks, policy development, good practice, and so on. Then she tells her own stories, good and bad (and there’s plenty of both in the BAE’s history), leaving the Loon out of it but otherwise hewing strictly to the truth. Then she tells them to find their own communities and comfort level—but lurk first.
That seems good advice for almost any instructor wishing to foster social-media use among students. Have them lurk first, and possibly only.
Thanks for taking the time to read, engage, and share my post, I greatly appreciate it. Your point, that we need to consider the platforms themselves when we talk about student privacy online, is, indeed, an extremely important one. It’s something I’ve spent a good amount of time researching and writing about (and, don’t you worry, the essay I mention in the post will spend a serious amount of time on this). And not just about how these platforms promote and complicate privacy (as you say, a pseudonym on Twitter, for instance, does not make one private by any means), but how they construct what we all too unthinkingly accept as “public” these days as well. Thanks again for keeping the discussion going and adding these crucial points; and, of course, for fighting the good fight for your students!
Thank you for laying out the issues so cogently, and continuing to engage with them. The Loon looks forward to that essay, very much.
As for “fighting the good fight…” there are days the Loon questions her own strategies. (Well. That’s most days.) Learning-by-doing is important, and sometimes even learning-by-breaking-things works. In this specific case, the consequences seem potentially so dire, though…
Food for thought.
In one class, I do ask students to contribute to a public class blog specifically so that they can think about what goes into writing for the public and try it out. (It’s WordPress-based; they typically don’t use their full name as authors.) I also plan this year to do something with microblogging, inspired by essays in http://webwriting.trincoll.edu/, but I’ll give them choices about how to go about it so that they needn’t create and use their own Twitter account. I really just want to introduce them to the idea of how scholars use Twitter as a backchannel.
To me, this is kind of like asking students to create a website – doing work for a (small but) public audience. We definitely will be talking about privacy issues and the weird economics of the “free” services that aren’t.
Ok, so I am not AT ALL defending the Wikipedia / Wikimedia community (which has a well deserved reputation for nice in person and mean online along with numerous other bias issues) but I will say that one of the things I appreciate about the community is the ability to be pretty anonymous — you are never forced to reveal age, gender or even species. Which may be part of the problem — editors hide behind their user names. I do give the community credit for outing and highlighting their own bad behavior, and making addressing issues of addressing systemic bias one of their priorities. I can’t disagree with your buzzsaw comment, but I have a hard time just writing Wikipedia off and walking away because there is a lot of good there, too.
Wikipedia is one of the more defensible targets for assignments, yes; anyone going into any job that puts cultural materials online would do well to have a basic grounding in Wikipedia editing. The ability to go anonymous (though this would be problematic in a classroom context where students are presumably being graded on their work) or pseudonymous is also in its favor.
The Loon has two problems with Wikipedia as it currently stands. The first, as you mention, is its frustrating cultural biases and hostility; they are working on it, but it is still not at all hard to imagine a student winding up buzz-sawed. Teaching any technology is an exercise in trust, often, and trust is fragile—the Loon hasn’t done any good for anyone involved if a classroom experience turns a student off Wikipedia forever!
The other problem is the steep slope of Wikipedia’s current on-ramp. The Loon participated in a recent edit-a-thon, after not having done more to Wikipedia than correct a little grammar for quite some time. She cannot say this loudly enough: the new-to-Wikipedia experience is overwhelming and Wikipedia’s scaffolding for new editors is stunningly inadequate. “Read these sixteen Very Long Pages about how Wikipedia works, learn the most obtuse and convoluted wiki-markup system ever, and oh, have fun!”
Yes. Well. No, actually. And the Loon does not have classroom time for all that nonsense.
Heartily agree with both your points. Editing Wikipedia is actually pretty straightforward. The culture (coupled with anachronistic technology) is where the real learning curve is. That, and the preference for the community to huddle together in IRC of all things for off wiki discussions. Hello, 1989 is calling and it wants its technology back. If you even have time or inclination to check out the Teahouse, I’d endorse that. They’ve hand selected friendly and knowledgable Wikipedians to staff it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Teahouse. But otherwise, yeah a long way to go.