Edited by author 03-26-2005 03:13 PM
Strangely enough, I've never really considered setting guidelines for myself with respect to my own class blog. This is despite the fact that I've discussed everything from meeting my girlfriend to poor academic performance on tests.

I think the best advice I've come across for posting to a personal blog - that is, one in which the author is known to the reader - is to follow Peggy's rule #1a listed below, which essentially says that one should only post entries with content that the author would be comfortable personally saying to the face of any potential reader.

I think the purpose of anonymous blogs is to post something that one would not necessarily be comfortable saying to the face of a potential reader, and I believe these types of blogs serve a different (lesser?) purpose than personal blogs - to be provocative and promote conflict rather than promoting understanding. (I hope this doesn't make me sound like I don't understand or appreciate their place, I just think the two hold different weights in the public arena)

As far as my experiment journaling project I think I would address the issue by having the students, either collectively or individually, come up with blogging guidelines. I could see it fitting well into their individual proposals for the project and could in fact lead very naturally into a discussion about scientific integrity with respect to stating results and conclusions gathered from data (not to mention a discussion on the integrity of the data itself).

I doubt I would accept from any student a blog content guideline proposal that did not state that their comments would refrain from profanity, slander, and off topic entries, but in my experience the students are consistently tougher on themselves with rules and regulations than I would ever consider being, so I expect the majority of them will cover at least these three bases.

While some dislike the use of certain less concrete words (respect, excessive, etc.) in forming behavioral guidelines I actually encourage their use because it always offers me as the teacher a sort of "out" when a conflict does arise. Ultimately, what is "excessive" or "respectful" is defined by me, and when put in the position of being judge and jury for certain students in specific incidents I like to have the wiggle room that those words allow me in the interpretation of those incidents and the subsequent punishment so many of them precede.

Thus, rather than seeing the immaculate breakdown of every potential blogging violation and their consequence(s) as a liberating thing, I see it as constricting. Better I think to make the students live up to standards of their own devising and then evaluate them on how well they adhere to those standards than to make them live up to standards I've set up for them. Might the latter actually encourage rebellion and increase the number of violations? I think in some cases, yes.