Learning in the age of exposure

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We live in an age of exposure, in which it is considered normal for a vast segment of the population to casually disclose their lives on social media, sometimes with disastrous long-term consequences. However, privacy-protection concerns should not hamper the benefits that a society of sharing can bring, a delicate balance indeed. Can we capitalize on this situation in order to foster a better e-learning environment? In this research program, we propose to address the various privacy, publicness and ethical issues inherent to e-learning in a platform that includes a social media environment. Our first purpose is to design a framework in which students as well as instructors are guided through a process that will help them understand and define their privacy and publicness needs and then build a community of trustworthy co-learners who share interest in their subjects of study. This will allow us to implement and validate a platform that corresponds to this design. Throughout the process, students will be protected against potential malicious actions (such as illegitimate access to personal data and tampering with such data), not only from their peers and the outside world, but also from malicious course instructors. Conversely, students are prevented from illegitimately tampering with their own records. We propose to develop two agents called contact manager to help a student through the entire learning process and vigilance manager to help the instructor keep careful watch for possible dangers and misbehaviour. This system sifts through social media such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn in order to build and maintain a growing community of users eager to learn and share in various fields of study. A personalized environment of co-learners is distilled for each individual student, initially under the suggestion of the contact manager but increasingly under the personal control of the student as he progresses not only through his study but also in his awareness of privacy, publicness and ethical issues. Similarly, the vigilance manager help the instructor manage his contacts with the students in his course, the other students in the platform, and the other instructors. This program will culminate with the realization of a proof-of-concept implementation.