January 7, 2008

Eduwonkette and Anonymous Blogging

Filed under: Education by Leo Casey @ 11:08 pm

Eduwonk’s Andy Rotherham has been as persistent and loyal an advocate of NYC Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein and his policies as anyone in the educational blogosphere. That is his right. But it raises questions about the concerns he expresses in this post, especially since Rotherham is explicit that it is Eduwonkette’s criticism of Klein’s policies that he finds troubling.

Long before Eduwonkette appeared on the scene, there were numerous examples of bloggers criticizing educational policy and public figures in the field of education from behind the protection of anonymity. One wonders why the point is only made now, when an anonymous blogger who does such a masterful job of skewering Tweed policy has appeared on the scene.

For the record, we don’t know who Eduwonkette is. And in most cases, we do believe that blogging under one’s own name is the better choice: when a person knows that what he writes will reflect on his person and reputation, most of us are more inclined to employ norms of civil discourse.

But there is also good justification for many bloggers to blog anonymously. Our new teacher diaries here at Edwize are anonymous, for a number of obvious reasons. And it is not all that difficult to bring to mind some equally good reasons why Eduwonkette might want to remain anonymous. After all, it is not as there were no object lessons from which a person could reasonably conclude that a publicly identifiable critic of Tweed would face negative fallout.

2 Comments »

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  • Oddly, I agree with much of what’s being said here, but would like to comment on a couple of things.

    In the 3rd para., where it says that a person will be more inclined to “employ norms of civil discourse” when he writes under his real name: Actually, many people who blog under a pen name are very much aware of the persona they are creating and speaking for in print. That persona may be an alter ego, an historian, a critic, a truth-teller, or a combination of some of these, but what he writes is not “off the cuff” or uncontrollable, as LC implies. As we all know, it sometimes takes hours to write a good essay and bring it up to printable standard, and I use the word “essay” instead of “blog” because that is what a well-written post is: an essay.

    Para 4 lays out why bloggers go to pen name and anonymity, for cover. There is no way to know whether Tweed has a already created a blacklist of undesirable educators, but I suspect they have.
    Teachers with long careers of full S ratings have been harassed, excessed and barred from interviews. We can assume some of this obvious push-out is the result of explicit or not so explicit age/salary directives coming from Tweed, but blacklists are also a very real possibility in Klein’s version of what constitutes “fair” labor practices.

    Comment by JW — January 13, 2008 @ 8:55 am

  • [...] thing, I do have to say that I took some of this stuff into consideration, considering a recent debate about anonymity in edublogging.  Now, I don’t have any wild pictures or anything out there since I am a terrible introvert, [...]

    Pingback by geek.teacher » Blog Archive » This just in: Teachers are people, too! — April 28, 2008 @ 4:29 pm

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