Opening Up the PSU Discussion of Ethics

I am working with Nancy Tuana at the Rock Ethics Institute and we are thinking about opening a new blog we created on the Rock blog site called "Speak Up" to the entire Penn State community.

First, is this technically possible given the structure of the blogs@psu implementation of Movable Type?  It would require, in effect, making all PSU users who have activated their personal space co-authors.

Second, what are the advantages and dangers of such a model?

Let me think out loud here about this for a moment:

The advantage is that we embrace a way of being open that has the possibility of making the REI blog a genuine site for the organic growth of a community concerned with pressing ethical questions that arise in students' lives.  If we can lay out a set of guidelines, practices and conventions about posting to the site, it would give students a way to "Speak Up" about ethical issues they confront everyday.  This is potentially a very powerful model and possibility.

The danger is that the space will become too contentious and overwhelmed by students who are unable to distance themselves from their deeply felt convictions to engage in reflective and conscientious ways.  My initial response to this is that our role as educators is to help students learn how to engage in thoughtful dialogue about precisely such issues of contention.

Everyone I talk to about opening university controlled digital spaces to student generated content, students included, express skepticism about the students' ability to engage with one another in a mature and thoughtful way.  My intuition, and it is based on my experience with students in the classroom, is that when administrators, staff and faculty are part of the community these digital spaces open, students respond in thoughtful and often quite remarkable ways.

What do others think of this model?

Comments

[Christopher P. Long]

Brad has indicated that making everyone a co-author might not be the best way to go even if it were technically possible.

As I understand it, our goal at the REI is to engage students where they are about the ethical issues they confront everyday.

One possibility might be for an aggregation of tweets modeled on something like the installation NC State wrote to aggregate its "twitterverse."

See Brad's post on Stuff for this: http://blogs.tlt.psu.edu/projects/stuff/2009/11/nc-state-on-twitter.html

Here I could imagine a twitter hashtag like #SpeakUp or #RockSpeakUp that could be used by students to tweet ethical questions or issues that arise for them. They would be limited to 140 characters, so they would only be able to gesture to the issue.

However, this then could be aggregated to the site and trending issues could be addressed by student bloggers who are interns for the Rock or part of the Schreyer's Honors College or Paterno Program blogging corps.

What are the pros and cons of this model?