I can see that this topic has been comprehensively discussed in the past and that there is a feature under development. My interest is in a student being able to post to a forum or take part in an activity using a pre-defined (in their profile) pseudonym, a sort of "post as" option. Many are used to assuming an alternative online persona and this would allow the adoption of a degree of anonymity that may be perceived as less threatening, a sort of pen name for publishing
There are many good uses of "anonymity" in an educational context, and as I understand the proposed anonymity functionality, users with the appropriate capability would still be able to see the user's real name.
- "suggestion boxes", or discussions where personal matters are discussed may be better when users have (the option for) anonymity
- pseudonyms (as Teresa suggested) could be used for role playing. e.g. if students are studying government, and role play different members of the government, the forum may be more effective if their names show up in the forum as the person they are role playing, rather than their real name; or students can explore prejudices by participating in a forum in which each student takes a name with a different gender/race from their own
- pseudonyms may sometimes be as distinguishing, if not more, as real names (e.g. How many "John Smith"s are there?)
- yes, sometimes I do want assignment submission to be anonymous, because sometimes knowing the identity of the student may unfairly bias me either positively or negatively towards their work
- online learning already has some degree of anonymity (e.g. all that I know about you is what you post in your Moodle profile -- I don't even know if "Joseph Rézeau" is a real person, and I'm certain that you don't look exactly like your profile picture). Sure, users need to be matched up to real-life people in some way, but (depending on how signup/enrolments are done on the site) there will always be some anonymity already.
- if students need anonymity for whatever reason, it is better to give them the option of anonymity in an appropriate context, rather than forcing them to be anonymous site-wide (by putting in bogus profile information).
As far as implementing anonymity, I've done some work with forums, and it's quite hard to do, since there are so many places that a user's name shows up. There has been some thought put into a generalized anonymity system for Moodle that all modules could use if needed, but as far as I know, not much development work has been done yet.
Hi Hubert,
I am glad my little "rant against anonymity" has triggered your detailed and well-argumented response. Thanks for taking the time to give all those useful examples.
Joseph
... and yes, that's my real name. And if I don't look exactly like my avatar picture, my avatar picture certainly looks like me, at times.
HI Joseph,
what I am suggesting is not infact anonymity in the true sense as the "pen name" would simply be an alias for a student who is known to the course tutor and of course admin etc. For some students the embarrassment factor of recording their voice is very threatening and in language teaching we need to encourage this sort of intereaction to develop pronunciation etc. What I am suggesting is simply a way of identifying against a persona that allows a degree of personal protection in the same way as one can create an avatar in SL.
Yes there are some arguments for anonymity but they need to be done were other students can not see the work.
How do you prepare for some of the students identities leaking out. People accidentally say identifying things at the most inopportune times. Imagine things posted in anonymity suddenly losing that shield.
The students will also probably make a game of figuring out who is who pretty quickly.
"Sally was not near a computer when that got posted but Bill, Sarah and Mark could had posted as they were in the lab. So we can rule Sally out as Markus A."
Sockpuppets get found out all the time and your students may find it more interesting to figure out who is who than what the work is.
'lo
You can allow students to change their name when they edit their profile, at least for manual and ldap-authenticated accounts. My guess is you're aware, but I don't quite understand why that doesn't solve your problem.
Cheers
(Note, in general, I'm against anonymity, but think ideally the software should support named and anonymous posts. See a related comment of mine in the tracker about anonymity in Feedback modules.)
BUT, (& I could be wrong) if user posts as Ben Reynolds and then changes his first name/surname to Anon Ymous, the previous posts do NOT change the username.
AND, if you are using bulk upload of users, you have to be careful not to "out" users by restoring the SIS first/sur - names on subsequent uploads.