You visit a blog, causing the blog's owner to give money to charity. You visit a blog, causing the blog's owner to give money to charity: Sound too good to be true? It is true, according to this post from Law Professor Jack Bogdanski. [How Appealing]

Hmm, I smell a good trend.  Traffic for charity.  An excellent idea.

2:56:55 PM    comment []  

"Student Will Not Be Disciplined for Memos". "Student Will Not Be Disciplined for Memos": This article appears today in The Harvard Crimson. It involves blogging (and this blog in particular). [How Appealing]

A little background: A student at Harvard gets his hands on internal memos from Diebold regarding issues with its electronic voting system in use in 37 states including Mass.  He posts the memos on his blog, hosted at Harvard, gets a C&D letter to remove the memos.  Harvard pulls down the memos and ponders whether or not the postings violated the University's computer policies.  Ultimately, the University decides the postings did not violate the policy enough to warrant sanctions, but the memos stay offline.

The blog was hosted as part of Dave Winer's Berkman experiment in bringing blogging to the masses at Harvard.  The issues raised by something like this require careful consideration by University policy-makers.  Blogs substantially lower the threshold for web publishing.  It is rather easy for anyone to run a weblog using Manila as setup at Harvard.  If you provide the tools for easy web publishing to the entire University community how do you adjust usage policies to take this into account? 

Ease of use means more, maybe a lot more, folks publishing on the web.  Some of them will almost certainly post things that are considered inappropriate here, there, or everywhere.  Dealing with inappropriate blog entries can be very problematic for a university.  The institution must be able to enforce a policy that permits free expression without exposing the school to liability for the content of posts.  It must encourage appropriate use without censorship.  All of this must be done in the open since blogs can have a wide audience.

It is easy to imagine that some schools will avoid this thicket by simply not adopting blogging technology.  That is too bad, because the potential upside to blogs in the education world is great.  Other schools may adopt an approach that allows for the use of blogging tools in a limited universe, say, no access outside of campus.  This works if you are limiting the use of blogs to class work and for internal use.  But what of schools who seek to provide the greatest level of discourse amongst faculty and students and the world?  Open blogs provide writers with world-wide audiences and can certanily enhance the reputation of a school, but they do need some controls.

Universities considering open blogging for all should consider carefully how they will deal with the various situations that can arise from inappropriate posts.  The possible range here is broad.  We may be talking about anything from racist remarks to derogatory comments about a faculty member to posting of unlawfully obtained information.  Anything from infractions of student conduct code to real civil or criminal liabilty can turn up on a blog.  Given such a spectrum, a single blanket policy may not be enough.  On the other hand, the institution doesn't want to put itself into the postion of needing to actively monitor blogs to make sure they conform. 

A blog policy should be structured to first provide a set of guidelines for running a blog on a university system.  This should include acceptable use standards, the placing of repsonsibility for content on the blog's maintainer, and settling of issues regarding things like copyright.  Then the policy should address what happens when something goes wrong.  What will the school do when a certain post is brought to its attention as inappropriate?  What standard will be used to review the post?  What are the potential outcomes for complaints?  How are standards applied to different groups (faculty, students, staff). 

A well though out blogging policy would allow a school to deploy these great new tools to its entire community and deal with the good and bad that will come along.

9:58:26 AM    comment []