Issues and challenges in educational uses of social software
These notes are part of a series for the book.
Outline
- Disruption and change
- Institutional cross-cutting cleavages
- Contextual ambiguity
- “Duplicate” functionality
- Privacy and social software
- Privacy and teachers
- Why do people disclose?
- Trust
- Access issues and the digital divide
- Mobile learning
- Cultural considerations
- Information overload
- Filter bubbles and echo chambers
- Conclusion
Notes
This chapter looks at the problems with social software for formal learning (in schools and other institutions) rather than informal or non-formal learning. There were quite a few issues discussed, but my notes here only focus on the issues of privacy, disclosure, and trust.
Privacy
The authors reference Altman’s (1976) work in their discussion. Altman stated that privacy is:
- About exclusion: Keeping yourself or information about yourself away from others
- About control: Having the right to decide what type of information is available, and to whom
- Not static: The privacy we want changes based on needs, wants, and circumstances
To get the privacy we want, we use boundary tools:
- Verbal and non-verbal behavior to encourage or discourage people from entering our private spaces
- Environmental structures, such as doors and fences
- Cultural constraints that inform us which information we can ask others to share, and that defines our boundaries
Technology has affected these boundary tools:
- Verbal and non-verbal behavior: This depends on knowing who has potential access to your information, but that is unknown on the Internet.
- Environmental structures: When people have multiple identities online (for personal, work, etc.), they are trying to erect environmental structures.
- Cultural constraints: These are still being worked out — when is it OK to share from one context to another, etc.
Privacy and teachers
There are also privacy issues affecting teachers. The teacher-student relationship usually is somewhat formal with positional identities, and with technology the line between friend and teacher can become confused.
Interesting and provocative idea: ‘The notion that teachers should be role models is deeply embedded in the way the profession is viewed in society, but we question the value of a role model who demonstrates secrecy, and by implication, hypocrisy. We believe that teachers should present themselves as they are, not as they should be…. Context matters, and some things are rightfully kept private from some people. But the notion that the solution to the problem is to keep everything secret to the extent that we reject personal connection with those we teach is taking secrecy too far, and represents a failure to embrace an adjacent possible that can greatly enrich the learner experience’ (Dron and Anderson, 2014, p. 286).
Many people use different tools and platforms for different facets of their lives, as a way to handle online identity and privacy.
Trust
Privacy is related to trust. We trust teachers to guide us in the right direction and to encourage us. We trust our classmates to help us learn different perspectives and to be someone familiar by our side as we face new concepts and situations.