Some Thoughts about Warwick Blogs
Writing about PDP meeting from E-learning Advisor Team
I’ve been thinking a little bit about how this is different to EveryOtherBlog™. There are clearly some fundamental differences between the way that blogs will be used, and how your average MT blog works. And I think most of it comes down to ownership again.
You own your blog. But do you?
Legal status?
Presumably, the author maintains the copyright to whatever they put up on their blog, whether it is published as a “public” or a “private” entry. Users are certainly not asked to sign away their rights.
This is fundamentally different to a public forum, where the author loses ownership of a post as soon as it is completed.
Teams
As is currently proposed, a group will not be a seperate entity to its members, but rather an aggregation of the posts that those members choose to categorise as part of that group’s work. So far so good. But how does this affect the idea of the author owning their blog?
Perhaps I write something about a meeting that I went to, then some time later decide that I want to change my mind about it. So I edit my post. This is my right, since it’s in my blog. But, wait, it’s also a part of the team effort. Now my record of the meeting has changed, after the event. Who noticed that change? Where is it visible?
Or perhaps one member of the team leaves the university, and wants to delete everything from their blog. It’s their right to – they own it. So one member of a team has just airbrushed themselves out of the group record, if the blog is the primary group record.
Okay, so perhaps team members shouldn’t be able to change entries in their team categories after the event. But, wait, it’s not in a team blog, it’s in my personal blog too. Do I not own things in my own blog any more?
It’s My Choice
Blogs are (usually) personal and utterly selfish places. You can post what you want, when you want. But now your personal tutor will be prompting you with things they’d like you to write about. And you’ll be expected to do some team work on this system. So you don’t have choice about what to blog in those instances.
But I thought it would never end…
Quite simply: what happens when people leave Warwick? Do their blogs hang around here? Can they delete them? If not, then there are data protection and copyright minefields to negotiate. If you want to sell blogs as something that you can use to evidence your writing style, then surely people would have some expectation that the record of their work will remain after they have left here.
So, just a few ideas. I don’t know if these have been addressed already, but I have seen no mention of them.
June 27th, 2004 at 12:51
COMMENT:
The idea of what happened at the end of someone’s time at Warwick came up in the inital focus group.
It was thought, then, that the blog would probably expire when the usercode expired, about 6 months after graduation/leaving. It was also suggested that the student/staff member should be able to save the whole of their blog as a personal (if not public) record, so they could provide employers, etc. with specific examples of their writing style.
I’m guessing this is what the ‘export’ option in the Admin screen will eventually do.
There’s certainly an argument, though, that if the login code could be extended for as long as someone remained a member of WGA, and the blogs were clearly marked ‘alumnus,’ the content could stay up there, and people could stay members of the blogging community.
It seems a shame that if people get to enjoy blogging in this very specific environment, which isn’t, to my knowledge, replicated elsewhere on the net, that they will have to stop, and their work will ‘die,’ once they leave uni!
June 27th, 2004 at 13:41
That’s what I was mostly concerned about – that this is a very specific environment, and I’m not sure how any of the work here will stand once taken out of context – It’s only by having easy access to the other articles that people are writing about, to the comments, to the whole package that it makes much sense to me.
June 29th, 2004 at 16:02
Legal status: The author owns whatever he or she writes. But use of blogs is subject to the same Ts & Cs and Acceptable Use Policy that every other use of IT facilities at Warwick is. So defamatory, obscene, threatening or copyright-breaching posts will be subject to deletion and/or disciplinary action.
Team blogs: We wait to see how these issues are worked out by team members. Team blogs are interesting and desirable but not the primary focus of the Blogs project, so at this stage we are offering them “as is” to see whether they turn out to be useful or not.
Choice: Maybe in the longer term blogging could become compulsory in the sense of “contributing to your final marks”. But we’re some distance away from that. Nobody has to respond to a blog prompt; the point of them is to stimulate reflective thinking. If that works for you, great, if it doesn’t then you can freely ignore or delete them. The choice is yours.
Never end: Tricky. We’d like to offer blogging facilities to people even after they leave Warwick, but there are some issues to work out first, notably the Janet T&Cs, and the bandwidth, server and human costs of supporting a user-base which could grow to thousands quite quickly. At the very least, though, we’ll allow users to take their blog with them, either as a web site stuffed into a zip file, or in a format suitable for importing into a commercial system such as TypePad .