Who's afraid of the internet? As at all ed tech conferences, there was lots of talk about leveraging the internet for education the Mid-Atlantic Regional Educause Conference. My own talk was a discussion of the use by Michelle Francl and others of podcasting and screencasting technology. The conference is made up of people across all sections of a typical IT deparment--educators, technologists, administrators, network engineers and more. Everyone has their own particular concerns. Mine is thinking about the best, easiest and most effective ways to use technology to make learning better. And, for me, the internet is one of the best tools to achieve many learning goals. However, there are others who are clearly concerned, worried, even afraid of the internet.

This fear came across in questions such as

• "What if someone steals your materials?" in response to my presentation
• "Why would anyone want to make their work public?" in response to a discussion of eportfolios
• "How do you handle students who may write things they're not proud of?" in a hallway discussion about class blogging

I'm not discounting their fears. For example, there are real intellectual property issues to contend with. Copyright laws are lagging so far behind the technology. People are worried about others scooping them, plagiarizing them, etc. On the other side of the fence, it's also difficult to acquire permission to use material in online course materials that are freely available. Jean-Claude Bradley at Drexel found that out and now no longer uses the textbook that denied him permission to use problem sets.

Putting your work online is risky, but as Steve Lawrence thoroughly explains, freely available articles get cited more often. Part of the problem in putting work online lies in copyright law where people aren't always sure how to protect their work and what recourse they might have if they find they've been plagiarized (see Creative Commons for some options). But a bigger part of the problem might be the requirements for promotion and tenure. This year, the MLA made a resolution that English departments should should stop considering the monograph to be the main requirement for tenure. There are good economic reasons for this and it's good to see the organization moving in what I think is the right direction. A scenario that connects their resolution to online publication might go as follows. A young tenure-track faculty member decides to keep a research blog for work on her monograph that will, hopefully, get her tenure. Someone stumbles upon the blog, co-opts her ideas and publishes a book before the young professor gets a chance to. Sure, the professor might have a court case, but she has lost her tenure run.

Then there's the student side of the equation. People are afraid to put them out into the world. Instead, they want to keep them in course management systems or other protected sites where the only people they're interacting with are their classmates and their professor. All this does is replicate the physical classroom. Putting their work online--publicly--takes them beyond that protective environment. And they can learn from that in ways they can't learn from just their classmates. They can see how real people react to their ideas. They can be forced to contend with those reactions. And yes, there are risks in doing that. But there are ways of still protecting the students. You can use pseudonyms. And you, as the professor, should always be there as a guide to help them learn from the experience.

Why put any work out there in the first place, whether yours or your students'? Fundamentally, it's to connect to real human beings. It's not about the technology, though the technology enables the connections to be made. We all want to hear from people, whether it's to argue with us or to agree with us. Part of the academic endeavor is to investigate, question, throw some ideas out there to see what people think. If you're an academic who attends conferences, publishes papers and books, you get that opportunity all the time. The internet enables your students and regular folk, like me, to have that opportunity as well. And it's well worth the risks.

My message to those asking the questions that express a certain fear: what are you really afraid of? An inability to control learning? The unwashed masses who might sneer at your work, or worse, steal it? Instead of blaming the internet for your fear, figure out how to prevent what you fear from happening. The answer isn't to stay away from the internet, but to figure out how to use it to your benefit. ¶ 2:08 PM, posted by Laura