Privacy or anonymity
I’ve been ruminating on the ideas of privacy and anonymity a little bit over the past couple of days, especially privacy of student information in schools. For some people, guarding students privacy is considered to be best achieved by keeping all information about students, or as much as possible, completely away from the web. I think this is possibly out of a sense of wanting to protect students from being identified online by a possible real life abuser. This might be a concern for some students who, for instance, are being kept away from an abusive parent or family member. For most students, however, this is not an issue – the ninja-pedophiles-dropping-out-of-the-sky myth has largely been discredited, I think. Nonetheless, some educators would see total anonymity as the best strategy for protecting students.
I’ve been thinking that the issue in this case might be mistaking privacy for anonymity. Anonymity might be one way of protecting privacy, but it comes at the cost of denying access to participation in any kind of public life within a community. There are some cases where we might be protecting our students, but we’re also delaying their participation in the discourse that happens online. Eventually they will likely have some sort of online presence. I think we would do them a better service if we helped them to form a positive online presence. I’m sure that each of our students will eventually by googled (ick – I hate using google as a verb, but I feel compelled to) by a friend/enemy/potential employer. Wouldn’t it be great if the amazing video they did for a grade 10 science class was the first result? We can’t help them work towards that if we keep them anonymous online.
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