There’s a reason I don’t give my last name on this weblog, and a reason — although it’s an “academic” weblog, with “academic” concerns — I don’t have this hosted on my .edu site. While over the Summer I’ll be writing mostly about what I’m reading, I’m thinking about conducting a classroom study in the Fall (well, two classrooms, since I’m teaching two sections of first-year comp, computer-lab style), and classroom studies (and institutional review board approval) carry with them concerns about ethical representation of student participants. (If you’re interested, check out CCC’s “Guidelines for the Ethical Treatment of Students and Student Writing in Composition Studies,” College Composition and Communication 52.3, 2/2001, at http://www.ncte.org/ccc/12/sub/state9.pdf.) I don’t know if I’ll write about the study here; if I do, I’d anticipate being quite careful.
So that’s why anonymous commenting is enabled here (though, of course, it’s entirely up to you whether you want to stay anonymous): I’m figuring if a number of comments start to come with certain .edu e-mail addresses attached, it may become easier to figure out my institutional affiliation, and in a public forum like the Web, I’d feel really uneasy about saying anything about what goes on in my classroom, and having you, dear reader, realize that you know exactly who I’m talking about.
Which, of course, may be a very good reason not to discuss such things at all in a forum like this. At the same time, since I’m writing about computers and writing, and (I anticipate) about how students from differing class backgrounds interact, in writing, with the Web, and since I’ve had students who’ve composed public Web pages in my courses, this is something I’ll be thinking about further. It may be that the ethics of representing student writing vis-a-vis IRBs work a little differently when you’re dealing with the Web.
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