apcampbell

Rudolf Amman skillfully points out some important ethical questions concerning the use of Livejournal in classroom settings. He writes:

I’m
especially curious about the LiveJournal setting. LiveJournal is
tightly-knit set of micro-networks, some of them jealously guarded,
many of them complete with turf fights and a big dose of identity
politics added to the mix. And, of course, they’re much more adequately
described as “cliques” than as “learning environments,” a term that
many LiveJournal users would probably reject right out of hand.

So,
when you send your students there with a brief to interact with those
groups, aren’t you invading a social space? Aren’t you imposing an
educational agenda on that space that is alien to it?

The
Livejournal community is a socially constructed hive of activity
reflecting the collective mentality of its members, 90% of whom are
under the age of 25 (Bauer).
While cliques exist, as do ‘turf fights’ and ‘identity politics’, the
characterization of Livejournal being a ‘tightly-knit set of
micro-networks’ does not fit my experience of it. Both my students and
I have found members to be welcoming, open, and chatty. Not once during
the semester did anyone receive abuse of any kind from the dozens of
people we met online. We are not invading a social space but rather we
are contributing to it. It is just as much ours as it is theirs. As a
matter of fact, it could be said that other Livejournal members invade
OUR educational space; an invasion we most welcome. We do have an
educational agenda: to meet and converse with people outside the
classroom so as to practice what we learn in class and to become better
readers, writers, and communicators of the English language. Is
Livejournal a space alien to learning? No. What better way to learn a
foriegn language is there than to experience first-hand communication
with in the target language while meeting new people and forming
relationships? If ANY space is alien to language learning, it is the
traditional classroom itself!

Rudolf continues by asking some
excellent questions highlighting the ethical concerns with approaches
to learning that involve outside participants:

How,
for example, do the denizens of that space react when they learn that a
comment from a student of yours was offered by way of completing a
homework assignment to “make friends”? Once you’ve got “authentic
communication” started and “content and identity are bundled together,”
the bundle also contains real relationships with real people who may or
may not be aware that they interact with somebody who operates under
the constraint of being graded for their performance. Ultimately: yes,
it’s about “authentic communication”; but doesn’t the educational
framework — the supervising, the grading, the assignments — render it
fake and inauthentic?

Our work on Livejournal last
semester was scaffolded by homework assignments designed to model the
behaviour of a blogger. The reading/writing topics were different for
each learner based on his/her intrinsic interests. While there is
nothing inauthentic about that, what was lacking in about half of the
learners was a true interest in meeting people and putting the language
to use. Although they received occasional comments from native
speakers, they never took care to cultivate relationships through
conversation, resulting in rather static pages of little interest to
anyone. So that vaunted concept ‘authentic communication’ could never
exist without both parties making some investment in the relationship.
So for the disinterested students, their writing wasn’t fake, but
rather their genuine effort was lacking. The ethical concern of
disclosure of purpose was never an issue for these students because
they never developed any meaningful relationships. For the other half
of the class, the homework may have given them a push, but their
success was rooted in the genuine interest of meeting people and
learning the language. My guess is that these students saw the homework
assignments for what they were: keys to unlock the doors of access to
the world of foriegn language and culture, something in which quite a
few of them - being intercultural communication majors - have a real
interest. Although I encouraged all of them to tell their new ‘friends’
that they were Japanese students, I don’t think many of the outside
participants knew that running a Livejournal was part of the Japanese
student’s coursework. Had they known, would a relationship have
continued to develop? Does it really matter anyway, given the desire of
the students to form relationships with people from abroad? These are
important questions worth exploring further.
—–