Follow-up Question: Privacy Issues

Since my four colleagues have already responded eloquently on the issue of privacy, I will skip ahead and respond to some of their responses.

I have to err on the side of caution, especially when my students' privacy is at stake. I don't want them being subjected to unwanted harassment and/or solicitation. However, Tharon, Christine, Charlie, and Donna offer some interesting compromises.

Tharon spells out the two sides of the problem and a conclusion quite nicely in his response to this issue. It really has to be up to the individual teacher and class, and depends largely upon whether the goals of the class depend upon having an outside audience or having a protected space for students to write. But I'd like to add that even if the class has decided to go public, the students and teacher need to spend time exploring some of the consequences of going public, so that there are no big surprises when public web pages bring outside attention, be it desirable or unwanted.

Christine describes exactly the situation I attempted to address in "The Electronic Panopticon in Academia," a section of a recent article in Computers and Composition called "Teachers at the Crossroads: Evaluating Teaching in Electronic Environments." The electronic panopticon comes into play when administrators, supervisors, colleagues, or other outsiders can easily find online and "drop by" our online classrooms. The problem arises when they do not understand what they see, but have the power to make decisions in the faculty evaluation procedure. Unless they also know about face-to-face meetings and other activities that form a context for the online activities, they could misinterpret some of the "messiness" of online teaching as evidence of bad teaching; this actually happened to the friend and colleague of mine I use as an example in the article. Tharon reminds us of another example of this panoptic effect mentioned in Joseph Janangelo's "Technopower and Technopresssion" in which a certain teacher's colleagues accessed her computer files to find damning evidence that she was not doing her job (53-54). As these three stories illustrate, WAC/ECAC faculty do need to be concerned about issues of privacy and access to electronic information.

In Nostalgic Angels, Johndan Johnson-Eilola also shows how certain online environments can exacerbate the panoptic gaze of surveillance on more general terms. "Virtual workspaces exist in a structural framework that displays the workers to observers (84), he reminds us, exposing "both low-level workers and middle management to the view of the highest levels" (86). On every level and in every type of online work, surveillance from outside or above can violate privacy and influence evaluation and promotion. However, rather than frighten us into closing down all access to our online classes, this awareness should prompt us to (1) keep reminding ourselves that what we do online may be a matter of public record, and (2) make every effort to interpret and provide context for our online work to those who evaluate us.

I really enjoyed Charlie's (that's how I've always known you, Charlie!) response to this issue, because Charlie always brings in apt metaphors to help us understand the new terrain we writing teachers face in cyberspace. As I mentioned in my opening statement, in his 1992 "Computers and the Writing Classroom: A Look to the Future," Charlie gave us that wonderful metaphor for our uncertainty in our move to writing in cyberspace when he said that we were in an "amphibious condition" (14). This time, Charlie uses the term "air-lock" to describe yet another condition of being in between environments, between private, protected class space, and the raw exposure of the World Wide Web. Perhaps using the "air-lock" approach is ideal, for it limits that exposure to a known public, the class itself and any invited visitors. I agree with Charlie that the "air-lock" might be the best place to start, but if they can agree to brave the possible consequences, the class might eventually want to venture out into the open of that online "Grand Central Station!"

Donna reminded us that there are times that, as WAC/CAC professionals and experts in our fields, it is up to us to make decisions about what students need to publish for class, and where and when. Certainly we have the right to ask students to start out sharing their work with a fairly small group (using Charlie's "air-lock" approach"), then open up to wider and wider circles of audience. After all, if the goal is to prepare students for communication situations in their own fields, as Donna, Randy Bass, and a host of other WAC/CAC specialists suggest, they need to begin writing on "authentic tasks" for real audiences, with "public accountability." Of course, students can gain practical experiences with authentic tasks in internships and service learning assignments, but currently participating in Internet discussion groups (see Benefits 3 in my position statement) and publishing on the Web offer them the widest exposure to the most diverse (geographically and interest-wise) audiences.

Works Cited

Janangelo, Joseph. (1991). "Technopower and Technoppression." Computers and Composition 9(1), 45-64.

Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. (1997). Nostalgic Angels: Rearticulating Hypertext Writing. Norwood, NJ: Ablex.

Moran, Charles. (1992). "Computers and the Writing Classroom: A Look to the Future." In Gail Hawisher and Paul LeBlanc, eds, Re-Imagining Computers and Composition: Teaching and Research in the Virtual Age, pp. 7-23. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann/Boynton Cook.

– Michael Day
mday@niu.edu