This week's Times Higher Educational Supplement had what struck me as a slightly overegged feature by Adam Joinson "Does your VLE virtually undress its users?" with the lead-in:
"Few educators are aware of how online learning tools can betray the privacy of individual users and stifle their learning experience."
Joinson's article [120 kB PDF] made me wonder whether VLE using organisations ever have a policy of explicitly telling users what aspects of their behaviour on line can be and, more importantly, are monitored through the VLE, and what they tell users about how long they retain data of this kind, and what use they put it to.
I wonder if Government has fully considered privacy and data-security issues in its enthusiastic promotion, for education, of personalisation, unique learner numbers, personalised learning spaces, and e-portfolios.
Certainly this kind of issue can sometimes be taken exceptionally seriously by users, with plenty of scope for reputational damage. For more on this see dana boyd's excellent 8 September 2006 essay Facebook's "Privacy Trainwreck": Exposure, Invasion, and Drama. (Facebook is a several million member university-oriented US social networking rather like My Space.)
Joinson's own web site has links to some very interesting material, including a 40-slide powerpoint presentation from 2005 - Who's watching you? Power, personalization and on-line compliance" [1.35 MB PPT] - which reports on fascinating research on what leads people to part with personal information when asked to by management or (in the case of students) by their institution. Joinson's site led me to the ESRC funded Open University project Privacy and Self-Disclosure Online Project (PRISD) which is summarised thus:
"Disclosure of personal, often sensitive, information is critical to the development of trust and understanding in human relations. Increasingly, we will also need to disclose such information to relative strangers and information systems.
The PRISD project examines the determinants of people’s willingness to disclose personal information to Internet-based systems, the limits of that disclosure, and the consequences for the design of systems.
Uniquely, the focus of the project is on both the technology used to request personal information, and the social context in which the information is sought. The project uses experimental social psychology methodology and psychometrics to investigate people’s willingness to disclose personal information."
Other related posts of potential interest:
- Why youth heart MySpace - identity production in a networked culture.
- When did you last see your data, and who do you trust to keep it safe?
- Anonymity online as the default.
- Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical?
- Privacy, trust, disclosure and the Internet.
5/10/2006. Added forward link to Are anti-plagiarism systems ethical? 11/10/2006. Added forward link to Privacy, trust, disclosure and the Internet.
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