Masks

The disclosures that lead to a sense of violated privacy in P2PU can be augmented with controls that either change user expectations or reduce the impact of the disclosure. In this step, each disclosure was considered against a set of potential design alternatives that would mitigate the harm of the disclosure. These potential disclosures include preventing the information from being disclosed at all (don’t disclose), removing the identifying information from the data so that it can’t be traced back to an individual user (anonymize data), allowing users to provide different identifying information that may or may not be tied to their real identity (allow pseudonyms), aggregating data so that a single user’s data is not separable p. 24

(aggregate data), providing notice to the user about the disclosure before it occurs (provide notice), and allowing the user to choose whether or not the data is disclosed (offer choice). p. 25

From their old to their new guise, the conventional schools continue to regard learning as a matter of delivery. As we have argued, it is not. The old system, however, with its campuses and classrooms, nonetheless provided plenty of opportunities for students to “steal” knowledge from teachers and construct knowledge with peers, even though that was not necessarily the intention of the design. The new system, however, designs these opportunities out. The secure, narrow channels of digital technology make theft and collective construction much harder. Putting the pedagogy of the conventional classroom on line, that is, cuts out the hidden resourcefulness of the conventional classroom. (Brown & Duguid, 2000, p. 233) p. 61

Brown and Duguid, working at Xerox PARC in the 90s and tasked with “crack(ing) the learning problem” (Kumar & Ramsey, 2008), drew from the work of Lave and Wenger on learning as participation in “communities of practice” to declare that successful learning happens with and through other people and that what we choose to learn depends on who we are, who we want to become, what we care about, and which communities we want to join. Although learning is social, remind Brown and Duguid, doesn't mean that networked technology is always highly compatible with constructivist theories p. 67

In an important article entitled “Organizational learning and communities-­‐ of-­‐practice: Toward a unified view of working, learning, and innovation” (Brown & Duguid, 1991) Brown and Duguid argue against the assumption that, given the “right” medium people will exchange information freely because they say this overlooks the way in which certain socio-­‐economic groups, organizations, and in particular, corporations, implicitly treat information as a commodity to be hoarded and exchanged. p. 68

P2PU wants peers to be social with one another but has built an entirely new architecture to support this. If students set off to find their new school, they may be surprised to find a video-­‐recorded disco instead. The disco is great for a while: there are fancy suits, no hierarchy and you can leave whenever you want, but this becomes its key problem: there is no one to impress, no markers to highlight who are the access points to communities of practice and no private spaces in which to practice with your peers before you perform in front of those who will give you such access. If in a conventional school information flows like a classical symphony where some parts of soft, some parts are loud, some parts are fast, other parts are slow, the P2PU disco makes information flow at the same tempo and at forte throughout. p. 71

In boyd's language, contexts are collapsed that make spatial, social and temporal boundaries difficult to maintain. You seem to be my “buddy” now but might you be in control of a course I'm taking in the future? There are always “invisible audiences” present as we're interacting (future employers may be watching, now or in the future), with the result that there is a blurring of the public and private. In effect, there are no private spaces – no student lounge that students can return to in order to vent their frustrations, console one another or just “practice” before performing for the crowds that matter later on. p. 71

Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them of what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action. Because people can learn from example what to do, at least in approximate form, before performing any behavior, they are spared needless errors. (Bandura, 1977) p. 77

Daniel Solove's work in Understanding Privacy (Solove, 2010) is useful for extending our conceptions of privacy beyond “secrecy” (what he calls the “secrecy myth”) to its role in the maintenance of intimate relationships. Solove contends that 'The privacy-­‐as-­‐secrecy conception fails to recognize that individuals want to keep things private from some people but not others.' Although useful in understanding how privacy is being redefined, Solove's view is limited to understanding privacy in terms of the visible harms, rather than those that may be invisible (i.e. when certain groups stop participating because of higher risks). p. 89

Helen Nissenbaum's theory of “contextual integrity” (Nissenbaum, 2004) is useful to explain why even those activities taking place in public may actually be privacy violations. Nissenbaum posits two types of information norms that govern all areas of life: norms of appropriateness and norms of flow. Norms of appropriateness dictate what information about persons is appropriate to reveal in a particular context. Norms of distribution refers to the transfer of information from one party to another. Nissenbaum argues that personal information revealed in a particular context is always tagged with that context and that norms are relative or non-­‐ universal. She states that distributing social goods of one sphere according to criteria of another constitutes injustice. This is a particularly important perspective when looking at the ability to transfer information expressed in the educational sphere and using it to, for example, assess someone's suitability for a particular job. p. 89

danah boyd (2010) says that, while Nissenbaum argues that we need to approach privacy through the lens of contextual integrity, she believes that 'we need to examine people's strategies for negotiating control in the face of structural conditions that complicate privacy and rethink our binary conceptions of public and private. boyd introduces the concept of “networked publics” to explain how networked technologies reorganize how information flows and how people interact with information and each other. According to boyd, privacy is not dead, it is merely in a state of transition as people try to make sense of how to negotiate the structural transformations resulting from networked media. p. 90