# Rights and Responsibilities
All of my courses have public-facing components, in which you write or annotate for an audience of peers in the classroom and, where feasible and desired, the open Web. I do this for several reasons:

* I value the  [“building and sharing” ethos](http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/building-and-sharing-when-youre-supposed-to-be-teaching-by-mark-sample/)  of many scholars and teachers in the digital humanities and like to make my teaching materials available for other practitioners to study and transform for their own purposes.
* I find that the act of writing for a real audience, however modest, gives student writing a clearer purpose and makes it seem less like a pedagogical obligation and more like living, breathing intellectual exchange.
* I want my classroom be a real  [“public sphere,” ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_sphere) one in which we all practice the kind of rigorous, sensitive, ethical, reasonable speech that is the bedrock of a democratic society. And it ain’t really public if a public--even as modest and intimate a "public" as the twenty-something students in an average class in college--can’t access it.

These advantages come with potential pitfalls. You might feel self-conscious about your work being available to a broader readership. You might fear that something you write could come back to haunt you, say, in a job search. You might not want to reveal personal details or political preferences that you would prefer to keep private from some friends or family. Here are some policies and some workarounds meant to alleviate these concerns without losing the advantages of “publishing” our work:

*  I will never evaluate your work in public. Under  [FERPA](http://www2.ed.gov/policy/gen/guid/fpco/ferpa/index.html) , student records are protected from public view, and I will never post any formal evaluation of your work on a public forum. At most, I will respectfully and informally comment on your work in ways that are about furthering conversation rather than issuing a grade or levying a critique. For those interested in more detail on FERPA and higher education pedagogy, see  [this post](http://www.facultyfocus.com/articles/teaching-with-technology-articles/ferpa-and-social-medi).
* By default, our course blog is open to the all members of the CUNY Academic Commons. As such, students, staff, and faculty from Hunter or other CUNY campuses can access your work, but not non-CUNY folk from the open web. 
* You are welcome to delete any and all of your work at the end of the term. You are also welcome to leave it: I enjoy sharing prior students’ work with future students, so if you leave you work, your work just might help someone else.
* If, despite all the above, you still have concerns about sharing your work in this way, I will make every effort to accommodate you. I could, for example, allow you to post drafts but not publish them to the web or show you how to create a password-protected posts. Please contact me if you have concerns about sharing your writing in the way I'm suggesting.
* I urge all students to use a respectful tone when engaging peers and refrain from *ad hominem* attacks, offensive epithets or language, or any other rhetorical modes that detract from the rigor of intellectual exchange and free inquiry in our class. This norm covers both discourse during the class hour and the exchange of ideas on our official site and group. I reserve the right to remove any material you post on the site that violates these norms and to pursue other disciplinary measures to protect the integrity of the civil discourse in our classroom.