I’d like to spend some time thinking about the ethical considerations of asking students to use various online resources as part of the coursework.  By ethics, I mean two things:

1. Access– what hardware, software, and sites can we reasonably expect students to have and/or use?  (Are we leaving out students who don’t have as many resources?)

2. Creating an online persona (or adding to an existing persona)- should we be troubled by the ways in which services– for example, GoogleDocs– collect data in exchange for the free use of their services?  When I require students to sign on to these services, I want to make sure I’m not asking them to sign on to be tracked across all their web activity.

I’m eager to learn more about the best tools and practices that have been developed.