Question for Library School Professors
For those that assign a blog as a requirement for a course, do you give the students the option to not have the blog publicly available for all to read? If not, do you tell them how to set it up so that it isn’t?
Does this question make sense? Sorry, I’m running on very little sleep these days. Thank goodness for energy drinks!
The use of blogs to transmit regularly occurring writing assignments is required for several courses at the University of Alabama SLIS. These blogs are publicly available, as they are hosted using a local WordPress installation. However, each blog is identified only as a UA SLIS student blog, and therefore remains anonymous unless individual students elect to decloak themselves by adding their name to their blog. It is their decision.
In advanced courses, students are, indeed, encouraged to decloak in order to begin to establish a personal and professional identity in the biblioblogosphere. Students subscribe to each others post and comment feeds to increase communication activity (and the fun!).
Ultimately, providing the decloaking option is our approach to addressing the natural student reticence toward the association of their names with their initial writings as a SLIS student.
Thanks Steven. I was hoping that is the case (or something in place to protect the students) for all Library Schools.
Yes, I have had students in my class set up a blog as a requirement. Also, yes, I have given them the option of making their blog private and I have shown them how to do that. FWIW, I used WordPress.com.