Blogging & Scholarship

The confidentiality issue of blogging (or twittering) has to be resolved in favor of anyone I write about for professional and ethical reasons-- obscuring my blog identity as well as theirs to add a layer of protection for them.


But since all identities about whom I write will be most fundamentally protected by how I write, is there a way to provide my authorship "behind the scenes" to those who need it for scholarly purposes within the field of faculty development? I don't want to put it anywhere on my blog or in comments because that is searchable. But perhaps it could be provided via another avenue.

Here's my thinking tonight:
If you ask to cite something on the blog with my real identity, I would reproduce the desired post in a permanent Web page and ask you to cite that format. (You could ask by a comment with an e-mail or name I can look up via POD.) [If you don't know what POD is, then you probably aren't in the network of folks who would need to cite this blog.]

If you want to make attribution to p(l)odder, then cite away.

I'd ask individuals who want to link to this blog and who may know my identity to maintain my anonymity in any links. This would sustain the limited exposure of the blog and all the other posts on the blog.

I suppose someone could then track my identity by searching on unique phrases in a blog post and finding the other Web page, but they'd have to go to some trouble. I doubt much of what I have to say is worth the trouble, especially as the examples I'd use would be altered from the original.

Does that qualify as self-plagiarism?

Do you think this would work?
Am I being anal retentive?

Blogging: 4 Confidentiality Conclusions?

I consulted with several colleagues about my confidentiality dilemma and got some helpful feedback and enough closure that I'll be able to move on to my next topic. The results of that discussion are:

1. You should never assume real privacy on the Internet. Therefore, write as if the world knew who you were (with a caveat near the end of the post). Write as if the person about whom you are writing is reading the post.

An interesting insight from the group is to remember that persons opposed to your stance may be reading your material for the purpose of writing against it. An example was given of a radical group reading a professional newsletter so they could structure their campaigns against that group. (Web analysis software revealed the high frequency hits from the URL of the radical group.) Another example was provided of a journalist who frequented a listserv to, initially, write against the group. As time passed the journalist became more favorable. To me these are small matters as it is part of the conversation to be faced with those who disagree.

2. You must also assume, given the 7 degrees of separation phenomenon (in which each person in the world is only 7 social steps removed from another) that anyone reading what you write could actually be familiar with the person of whom you write.

Therefore, absolutely every case described must be altered to the level that a reader familiar with the person couldn't identify him or her. They suggested having a moderator review materials before posting.

Since this blog is about faculty development one may first think of protecting faculty clients. But the same rule applies to discussing students. If you lead a faculty-blogging program these issues should be part of the training.


3. You can keep the search engine connections between a blog and one's institutions to a minimum by not mentioning your school by name. This strategy is most pertinent for discussions of organizational issues but has to be acted on when the blog is first created.


While an educational institution may or may not have the same "expectation of privacy" that a person does, obscuring your institution offers another layer of protection for the institution. It also is more protection for individuals in that institution.

But one shouldn't count on anonymity as a guarantee of protection for the individuals about whom one may write. That protection will come in how the writing is accomplished.

4. A related issue that came up was that employers "google" job applicants and an example was given of an offer being withdrawn because of a social networking page content. (It is in litigation).

If you as developer are encouraging faculty or graduate students to blog, the recruited writers need to be informed about the potential audience. Then they can choose how they want to respond. Their choice may be to write as they wish. Or to be cautious. But it should be an informed choice.

Power, Writing, & Blogs

In trying to decide on the anonymity issue w/regard to my posts, I have been contemplating the power of writing.

If there is no power to writing, then being anonymous doesn't matter.
But there is power for author and for readers from the reflection and explicitness.
Any power can result in desirable and in undesirable outcomes.

As a rule of thumb, it is impossible to eliminate the undesirable outcomes, one can only minimize harm.

1. Retaining some level of anonymity would help to minimize harm for others. Ideally, only those in the field of faculty development who have a scholarly need to know could access my identity to minimize harm to scholarship. How to do that?
2. Another tool for minimizing harm is to introduce a time delay for more editing in any post that refers to potentially identifiable persons. If I think on the post overnight before posting, then I can review it another time with fresh eyes for anything that might be problematic. The caution is that blogs are about fresh writing and that could get lost.
   

It occurs to me I must do multiple edits.

• Once for me, that I'm honestly conveying what I am thinking and experiencing.
• Once for my clients (faculty and school) whose confidentiality I have an obligation to protect.
• Once for my target audience, faculty developers who may read this and find benefit from it.
• Once for others who may wander by-- students, staff, journalists who would have their own interpretations of what I write and put it to their own use, potentially misinterpreting what I say if they don't have the language of education.

Blogging, like other forms of writing, is an intersection, a conversation.

But everyone is able to come to the conversation and that makes the writing more challenging. So far I find the medium encourages fast writing--It is

• easy to post,
• ego-stroking to get comments.
• Writing for a blog feels intimate.

But the potential outcomes may require slow writing--

• it's impossible to take out of the public record what is said,
• humbling to have everyone potentially present, and
• it isn't really intimate. I'm not used to putting my heart on a billboard.

So far, I think there is a reward worth the risk. Writing has power. Published writing even more.

Blogging: Confidentiality vs Accountability

What are the parameters of blogging and how does posting here relate to the various professional obligations that I have?

My first thought, in my first post, was to protect the identities of any of my clients about whom I might write and thus to attempt to conceal my own since my work is tied to place and from place to people. That feels like a no-brainer.

But yet I felt an unease that I struggled to put into words. What about the scholarly record? There are good reasons that scholarly work needs to be both public and attributed (e.g., dialog is essential to develop further knowledge, tracking the source of ideas is key in building new understandings). If someone wanted to quote my work here, either the content or the process of doing a blog, then to whom do they attribute it? P(l)odder? that feels dishonest.

While I support anonymous works in the case of the powerless for whom there are serious risks if revealed (e.g., persons under despotism) it is not something I rest with easily in other cases (e.g., students or faculty needing to express distress about a supervisor). There are negative consequences of anonymity for the individual (a secret is hard to live with, it conveys that the person lacked courage to face the issue) and for the organization (secret accusations undermine trust).

One principle that helps me decide in other situations is to think about who the information "belongs to." In a therapist or lawyer -client relationship, the information about events belongs to the client who also owns how to respond to it. The therapist, for example, doesn't have a right to reveal information other than that which would physically endanger the patient or someone in the patient's environment.

This principle reminds me when I write to be respectful of information (life events) that may be felt to belong to others.

But I still have the tension between holding information confidential and being true to academia and principles shown to work for the best in the long term.

There are political situations that would be most helpful to write out and analyze...and they may be too complex to effectively obscure in a public post. (Perhaps that is why so much of organizational development literature is bland principles and not enough examples.)

So here's the role conflict: academic truth-teller vs developer (respecter of the people with whom I work).

And of course it may be moot-- on the Internet there is no real privacy, no privacy that can be kept for long. Perhaps this is an artificial problem because there is no way to achieve confidentiality in this environment without simply not speaking. But it helps me to lay out my role conflicts first so I choose what I will do (or at least have the illusion of choosing).

If I am to guide faculty or others into this blog environment, then I must be in a position to properly advise on problems such as this. For me that means I have to work them out for myself and then think it through for other disciplines.

So here's a try at some principles:
If there is no true anonymity, then a professional must default to a) obscuring individual identities and b) not sharing larger institutional political situations because any cover story is "thin" and easy to break.

One must simultaneously recognize that this is an academic forum and the expectation of truth telling is basic--one should say that any case discussed is altered from the original and the statement needs to appear with each case.

Or one could speak in terms of hypothetical situations. And speaking hypothetically should be an honest reframing that considers other situations, not a ploy to "cover oneself". (Simply covering oneself, while smart as a single act, is not respectful of the clients).

I'm still inclined to keep the authorship of this general site obscured from the general public since it isn't important for a casual visitor and adds another level of protection. But I'm contemplating ways to reveal my identity to those who need to know it for academic purposes--for citation, literature review, etc.