Re: Risks of using "free" public blogs and/or wikis for class activities

[Valdis Kletnieks <Valdis.Kletnieks () VT EDU>]

On Sun, 24 Jun 2007 20:24:34 MDT, Brad Judy said:

> When one of our students does something stupid off campus like theft I
> don't recall anyone coming after the university because they were
> "acting as a student of our school".  (If there is a pattern of
> problems, they may ask the university to help find a solution.)  Seems
> like you might actually be worse off if you gave them a university blog
> account and then they did something bad with it.

Unfortunately, you're arguing the wrong end of the problem.

The issue is where to host a blog set up specifically for "university-related
business" (in this case, class-related, apparently).  I'd expect that to be
opening up cans of worms if you host it someplace where you can't apply your
local policies/etc. In particular, what's your exposure if somebody posts
something to the blog that's *within* the hosting companies policies (so they
refuse to do a takedown), but is a violation of your policies?

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