IP and Social Media Use

 I am excited this week to dive a little deeper into issues of intellectual property, specifically in relation to their use in a Web2.0 context in education. IP in general is an important topic that I wish I knew more about, and while I have learned a lot from other courses in the ISLT program that touched on this topic I have never approached it from the standpoint of social media use specifically. 

I decided to start the weeks readings taking a look at Dennen's article on Technology Transience and Learner Data. Dennen's work explores the complexity surrounding digital artifacts created by courses utilizing social media and the emerging safeguards and concerns that accompany changes in technology in this area. 

As Dennen points out, one of the key challenges in this area is that people often are not overly concerned about issues of privacy around student data until something goes wrong or they hear of something bad happening to someone else.  It is particularly difficult for those medium spaces between public/private, such as a listserv that you must subscribe to, but anyone could subscribe to. 

While the ultimate goal should be to protect student privacy the difficulty comes in trying to do this while also encouraging student participation in social media class activities. A willingness to share and be open clearly benefits the class overall, but how should one encourage this while also respecting and protecting student privacy? Dennen also emphasizes the need for educators to understand the technology that they are using in the classroom, its implications for privacy issues, and how best to utilize that technology for pedagogical purposes. 

Even if the instructor does know how to use the technology it is often changing, for instance with the privacy settings for most social media platforms. As students are asked to BYOD to class, this causes overlap between personal and academic work that could raise problems. 

I was particularly interested in the section on data ownership and sharing. Over the last few years this has become a topic within my own field of Career Services as students are often asked to create student profiles for the Career Management Software that is purchased by the University. While these software systems are very convenient and can be beneficial in connecting searching students with potential employers, many companies do not take seriously the privacy concerns of students using the platform. This sort of issue arises less often in regards to the university's LMS because it contains almost exclusively academic course work which brings with it added legal protections. Yet, within a university's CMS there is often also academic course work tied to internship programs or other required career related events. I think it is essential that the same level of privacy is given to student data in a CMS compared to an LMS.