I’m a keen follower of Robert Sharp’s blog. In his speech arguing for a better debate around no platforming on campus, I was struck by the following:
“Having people read over your shoulder chills free expression! In order to write, think speak freely we need an expectation of privacy” (my emphasis).
This seemed to me to encompass a few of the issues we have covered in recent weeks on the IDEL course. I was surprised to find that the ‘spaces’ theme covered in weeks 10 and 11 didn’t touch on the concept of ‘safe’ spaces (or perhaps it did and I missed it). Does an ODL student require a safe space as much as an on-campus student? What would this look like? Is a statue of Cecil Rhodes just as offensive to an ODL student as it is to an on-campus student who has to walk past it every day? As covered in my recent post on being ‘at’ and ‘in’ Edinburgh, we experience campus in multiple ways.
It also, I think, touches on the discussion we had in weeks 8 and 9 on data analytics. Do data analytics have the same potential to chill free expression? What if, by being transparent about the data the institution collects from the student, we are not empowering the student to make more informed choices but rather run the risk of them attempting to play the game, and do what they think is expected of them? Or perhaps we should just accept that Big Data is a thing and it is therefore morally incumbent on the institution doing the collecting to help students with how to interpret this (in much the same way that the Managing your digital footprint project tries to do with students’ social media presence)?
Finally, what does an expectation of privacy mean in relation to a class? Are classes private spaces? Does moving them online (with the resultant shift from speaking to writing, or perhaps more accurately the shift from something impermanent to permanent) change how students experience the class? Or in the age of social media do we (as students) only feel that we have experienced learning if we have logged it somewhere digital (ie not via any Ars Memoria technique)? I am reminded of the example given in week 1 of the IDEL course where ‘Joe’ takes a photo of himself reading a course paper and then tweets it to prove that he is studying.
Leave a Reply