[TOS] About the POSSE cohort list privacy settings

[tosmaillist.neophyte_rep at ordinaryamerican.net]

On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 5:59 AM, Matthew Jadud - mjadud at allegheny.edu wrote:
> On Fri, Jul 8, 2011 at 01:51, Kevin Mark <kevin.mark at verizon.net> wrote:
>> material still being private. So do you think your list is going to be
>> permanently private?
>
> Hi Mark,
>
> My hope is that the list isn't permanent at all. I think (but could be
> wrong) that the spirit of such a list is for private discussion of
> current/timely events. Anything that's longer term than "right now" is
> (1) almost certainly not a "private" conversation, (2) will benefit
> from community input, and (3) should be killed/nuked/purged after some
> finite period of time. The private list should have no archival
> qualities, IMHO. (Nor do I expect it to have any archival value.)
>

 I would expect you could use the public list to discuss anything that
is similar to what you might discuss at a teacher training session,
even if it involves student grading and discipline and other private
data. They would not involve particular students (or certainly
shouldn't), but generic examples derived from the particular to the
general.

I understand the impetus to establish a private list until you get a
little experience that confirms the topics can be held to acceptable
subjects.

> Because we have to deal with FERPA and other issues,

Do I deduce correctly from the context that FERPA is the Family
Educational Rights and Privacy Act?

> it is good for
> the faculty to have a private bail-out, but we're all committed to
> working in an open space. I think, in this case, you have to trust the
> faculty involved to use their professional judgement as to when
> something *needs* to be private, and if something doesn't, then trust
> us to encourage each-other to put it on the main list/the wiki/etc.

When I was a system administrator and Federal standards for ergonomic
issues were implemented, Human Resources (or whatever they were called
at the moment) requested that the IT department (or whatever we were
called at the moment) spearhead the instruction of employee use of
chairs, desks, keyboards, and mice.  We found it was beneficial to ask
for HR involvement rather than hand-off.  The instruction became part
of new employee orientation because we were, by then, in the habit of
giving everyone a desktop machine along with their phone.

My suggestion here is, if you have some sort of compliance officer
involved with FERPA, it might be advantageous to involve one or more
of them in the POSSE so they get a feel for what you are discussing.
They will be better prepared when you structure a course around
participation in a project outside of the school's jurisdiction.

> In a nutshell, if we're trying to bring FOSS into our classroom
> context, there will be little value if we don't similarly open our own
> educational context to the community. We know that, but we also know
> that sometimes we have to discuss things privately for reasons beyond
> our control.
>
> I don't know if that helps or not.

Transfer of knowledge always helps.

>
> Cheers,
> Matt