You’re right - we have got things in place, we just need to make sure we implement them consistently.

MS

It’s great to have you as part of our community - you are having an influence. We are certainly trying to be positive rather than restrictive - hopefully that underpins everything we do on Edubuzz. We do, however, need to provide more guidance to users about our ‘netiquette’

As regards the dilemma - there are some occasions, such as the hypothetical situation above, where certain things that might be being done by the school or the authority to improve a situation cannot be shared with parents due to rights of the employee for confidentiality. Nevertheless, we should be exploring as many ways as possible of making parents aware of our priorities and building the necessary trust that we will deal with situations in schools with sensitivity for the person involved, whilst not being prepared to sacrifice the quality of education that children are receiving. My hope here would be that no parent would feel it necessary, regardless of acceptable use policies, to post a comment about a teacher in desperation because nothing was apparently being about it by the school. This has to be our goal.

Hopefully conversations such as this can help to build that shared understanding.

I wonder how you feel about the question I posed in the next post about seeing parents as customers. Do you agree?

But looking back to Don’s original post - the parents would not be posting as they are if they did not feel frustrated by their situation and thwarted in their attempts to deal with it. They don’t seem to have found a way to solve their problems through other channels. Dealing with the blog postings is the short-term solution. Where can they find a way towards a longer-term resolution?

With parents, and I think Guineapig Mum’s “AUP?” question sums this up, we need to be very explicit and very simple. Acceptance needs made at the point of blog creation (as it is with every commercial blog platform) and then, as platform owner, it is down to ELC to respond within 48 hours to any potentially libelous (or, in the case of podcasts, slanderous) claims. That might mean editing the entry and sending an email to the blog owner, or it might be temporarily disabling the blog.

From my point of view, for what it’s worth, I think ELC has all the elements in place, but now needs to make it an integral part of signing up to the system. The traditional AUP covers the main legal points, and the guidelines cover the more messy side of the social medium.

I think we want to be as open as possible but an AUP (acceptable use policy) would be worth putting together - parents definitely have role here to shape this for their peers. I’m going to make some other posts on issues which have emerged from this dilemma.

And, er, what’s an AUP?