This semester, I’m teaching “Information Technology and the Law”. We’re reading a series of articles and court decisions on important techno-legal issues.
I’ve created a student writing blog, on which students will post weekly essays on topics related to the course. Essays are 400-500 words in length, with due dates staggered through the week so that we get some new essays every day. (Some students writing under pseudonyms for privacy.)
The site is open to the public, for reading and comment. Please do drop in and join us.
“(We actually customized WordPress a bit, e.g. to create a Princeton-only flag, so that outside readers don’t see administrative postings about the course.)”
*gasp* A BROADCAST FLAG! Aaaaaaaaaaaa!
🙂
It’s a standard WordPress setup. WordPress has supported multiple users for quite a while. It doesn’t support multiple blogs well, but that doesn’t matter here since everybody is sharing a single blog.
(We actually customized WordPress a bit, e.g. to create a Princeton-only flag, so that outside readers don’t see administrative postings about the course.)
A great idea, Ed! And something that I am looking forward to learning from.
I assume that this is the multi-user/multi-blog WordPress that I keep reading about on the WordPress developer blog? How well is it working? I had not expected to make much use of that branch of the development, but I see that I was too narrow in my thinking!
Peatey: Students own the copyrights on their own writings. Each student will set his or her own policy. In the absence of any statement to the contrary, the standard rules of copyright apply, so that certain uses are infringing unless you get the student’s permission.
Chris: My response to the privacy issue is to let the students post under pseudonyms if they want. Several students are doing so. Blogging software makes this easy.
I pointed this out to one of the instructors I work with at Northwestern University. He’s running a similar student blog about “the future of news” and I imagine that there could be some interesting cross-institutional back and forth if he didn’t have it restricted to only the students. Damn FERPA!
🙂
Shouldn’t a blog writing about copyright have a copyright policy? creative commons, copyleft, all rights reserved, public domain, or something else?
Man, I wish you had done this for us last year. :-). I actually posted a comment on my blog regarding the class, and the TiVo commercial remover.