Best Practices for Dealing with "Terms of Service"?

[Charles Youngs]

As you sign up for a blog or related Web 2.0 you are asked to tick the box "I agree with the Terms of Service." Did you ever read the "Terms of Service" agreement? Have you asked your students? Their parents? Some are benign and merely limit the liability of the service provider. Others discuss in detail rules regarding copyright, intellectual property, and further, limit the rights of the users with regard to what they post. Much of the language is legalese and temps our ignoraning it. I find it important to have these conversations with teachers and students. I wonder whether teachers are talking about these concerns with stakeholders, and if so, what ideas are coming to the fore. Let's develop best practices for discussing our students' use and production of media for the Web.

[Bud Hunt]

Charles,

I'm pleased that someone is reading those Terms. I find it problematic to have students sign up for third-party services such as e-mail accounts and blogging services - I feel that, if we want students to use these tools, we should be providing them with the services that they need in a way that doesn't require outside deals and/or "cheats." My work as a district technologist has been to help to facilitate the creation of or installation of services like these on district servers, using free software like Moodle and Wordpress MU, for the most part.

Eventually, e-mail should be a piece of the students' puzzle, and services like Google Apps for Education make sense, too.

It just seems to me like it's bad business to outsource school to some third-party server. Your thoughts?

[Charles Youngs]

The IT director at our school--working with school board, administrators, and faculty--also seeks out these inhouse answers. I wonder if this is an old school model though, trying to control everything. Isn't outsourcing part and parcel of the what the Web is? Must we individually reinvent the wheel for every application we would like to use? How can we keep up, keep current, and not become in the eyes of our students irrelevant?

[Greg McVerry]

Charles,

I am glad you pointed this out. It is quite interesting watching the User Agreement of Google Chrome quickly evolve. The original version laid claim to any content created by users. That language has been stricken now. Does anyone know if the same is true for the Google Apps suite? Here is an article that lists other web tools that have a similar agreements.

[Charles Youngs]

Thanks for the news and the link to article. Of course, I was most intriqued by the National Writing Project's use of its End User License Argreement. I makes me wonder how many sites copy-and-paste other sites EULAs, thus creating a sort of viral strain of language presented in these sites. I'm also thinking of how one-sided the negotiation of site use is. Could there be a tick-box list of options? Could the end-user decide his/her terms? I guess I'm thinking of the model innovated by Creative Commons on copyright where creators/authors spell out the rights they give or do not give. It's good to watch Google evolve with regard to these matters, for it seems as Google goes so goes the world. Yes, they offer such alluring apps--can educators afford to turn away, or can we afford not to?

[dea conrad-curry]

I must confess...I sometimes read the "Terms of Service" and I sometimes do not. I tend to read those associated with newer services...anticipating they might have more blanket types of coverage. I wish there were some way to know how such terms are similar to and / or different from others....like when you buy a food product--the highest componenet part of that product is to be listed first and from there, ingredients in descending order.

[Amanda Triplett]

Well, I'm one that usually reads but sometimes continues on despite what it says. I'd like to change that, because in most of my circles, it's not a big deal. I'm teaching a number of 10-12 year old writers, who want to use Nings and Blogs and such. All of the sites I've seen say that users have to be over age 13 (I know I'm moving this discussion in a different direction), and how do you get around this? So, 10 year olds cannot have a blog for school now without lying about their ages, even if they are given permission to use a parent's email address for the sign up. Have any of you found a solution to this? -Amanda