While I don’t believe you can or should ever be the students mate, you can’t as you have to remain objective and impartial, that shouldn’t stop discourse. Indeed, I feel such discourse is so important to teaching and learning that I attempted to enhanced it by setting up a forum for my students several years ago. I wanted them to have a place to meet and discuss their work, problem, likes, dislikes…anything they wanted really but also to be able to access staff in a different way.

I was inspired to do this by an old Horizon show I had seen long before I was a lecturer. The show was about some subject I’ve long since forgotten but at one point there was a scene with a student in a dorm using an early chat facility to discuss work with peers and staff. This seemed ideal to me and when the opportunity and need presented itself many years later I thought I’d attempt to recreate this environment and create a way of reaching beyond lecturers and other formal mechanisms to support students and to facilitate them to support each other. It was a success, I believe, and while staff uptake wasn’t great it worked when it happened. There were limits however, often when a topic was about social life I could (unintentionally) stop a thread dead in it’s tracks by posting a comment. It largely depended on the individuals and the topic but there was an obvious if fuzzy line, a divide.

As a lecturer you usually know who’s working, who isn’t and who was out the night before when they probably should have been working. Yet the formal nature of most contact in a university seems to suggest to students that you don’t, that you couldn’t know. It’s possible that the less formal nature of the forum broke this barrier and made students feel uncomfortable at times, as you suggest. This was of course a false comfort and it’s absence didn’t present any true threat. At the end of the day it’s the work that counts but psychological safety is important when creating a learning environment and you have to know when to back of and leave that feeling intact.

For my next attempt at creating such a discourse I plan to use twitter hashtags to create conversations around modules and topics within modules. I anticipate that the biggest challenge will be balancing what is possibly with what is allowed. In all our communications with students we have to be aware that the Data Protection Act constrains what can be public, and rightly so. This will necessitate dropping to direct messages or email at times and I expect this could prove disruptive to the conversation. We’ll have to wait to see how this works but I’d welcome any ideas on how to do this.

Btw, regarding putting work online, this is something I am more than comfortable with but then I’n an Free Software advocate and welcome openness in all its forms. However, I think we have to be careful about the platforms we use when making material available as being open on a proprietary platform can result in giving aware control of material and potentially ownership, not to the student but to the owner of the platform. As a rule the platform has to be an open standard for me to be happy using it. this is limiting in the short term but I feel necessary.