Rebellion
Well, my last entry has caused quite a stir. I’ve received more emails and comments about this project in the last 12 hours than in the whole of the rest of the project. So, what happened? Well, we (the Garden Design teaching team) were invited to contribute a short article to the “Pass notes” section of the Garden Design Journal. The aim of that section is to provide students with useful small chunks of information relevant to their studies. Previous articles have included; Creative Thinking, Work Experience and Tutorials. Since we feel we are doing something new and interesting with the blog project, we felt that it would be ideal for “Pass notes”. Why keep a good idea to yourself? So, Annie was quite right in her comment; our aim was indeed to “communicate the idea of this (potentially successful) exercise to students and tutors of other colleges who might want to try it out”. Unfortunately, I did not foresee the reaction that this would elicit.
The fiercest reactions were from those of you who wanted to protect your privacy. While I sympathise with that, I’m not entirely sure what difference publishing details of the project in the GDJ will make. For sure, a few extra people may feel inclined to look at your blogs but since the blogs have all been public for that past 4 months, I figured that, by now, you may have become comfortable with that.
Some of you have gone as far as to remove your blogs and delete postings. Personally, I feel that this demonstrates a lack of respect for your own work. I am very sad that many very good pieces may have been lost unnecessarily, depriving other members of the staff/student team of some very insightful writing.
Had you been less hasty in your actions, your “privacy” could have been maintained by the very simple expedient of removing the link to your blog from this page. The article relating to this project will be published in the March issue of the GDJ and so we had a window of time in which this “situation” could have been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
On the plus side, I have received a number of supportive messages from students as well, for which I thank you (you know who you are).
As I said at the outset, this project is experimental and I am learning at least as much from it as I hope you are. With hindsight, I may have acted differently but I would always have published the article. If you feel that your privacy is being infringed by this action or that you would rather not have readers of the GDJ see your excellent work and read your enlightening thoughts, just email me and ask me to remove your name from the list on the right.
For your information, I have posted the article below.
The fiercest reactions were from those of you who wanted to protect your privacy. While I sympathise with that, I’m not entirely sure what difference publishing details of the project in the GDJ will make. For sure, a few extra people may feel inclined to look at your blogs but since the blogs have all been public for that past 4 months, I figured that, by now, you may have become comfortable with that.
Some of you have gone as far as to remove your blogs and delete postings. Personally, I feel that this demonstrates a lack of respect for your own work. I am very sad that many very good pieces may have been lost unnecessarily, depriving other members of the staff/student team of some very insightful writing.
Had you been less hasty in your actions, your “privacy” could have been maintained by the very simple expedient of removing the link to your blog from this page. The article relating to this project will be published in the March issue of the GDJ and so we had a window of time in which this “situation” could have been resolved to everyone’s satisfaction.
On the plus side, I have received a number of supportive messages from students as well, for which I thank you (you know who you are).
As I said at the outset, this project is experimental and I am learning at least as much from it as I hope you are. With hindsight, I may have acted differently but I would always have published the article. If you feel that your privacy is being infringed by this action or that you would rather not have readers of the GDJ see your excellent work and read your enlightening thoughts, just email me and ask me to remove your name from the list on the right.
For your information, I have posted the article below.
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