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Innovative Uses for a Computer Classroom?
flard asks: "I will be teaching a Freshman English class at a medium sized public university, in a computer classroom for next semester. Every student has their own machine with an internet connection. I am thinking about using a weblog for them to post their work and critique each other. Do you guys have any other cool ideas on what to do and what NOT to do?" How can the computers best be applied to assist in teaching a non-technical class? Use of a weblog is a start, but are there other pieces of software that can be deployed in such a setting?
Spring 1997 to be precise, I took a College Writing (English) section that was focused on online writing. Some of the things we did in class involved not actually speaking in class, but "chatting" over IRC with each other (even role playing as various internet folks and taking their views in the discussion). Personally, had blogs been as visible then as they are now, I think that would've been a great addition. Many classes have regular journals as part of their requirements anyway.
Rohcester Institute of Technology has a online submission system that checks for
:) They work great here at RIT. You won't believe how effective the plagiarism avoidance solution is.
1. Minimum assignment requirements met
2. Plagiarism
3. Submission/Deadline requirements
Hope you can get that setup
- Santosh
Santosh Dawara
Instead of passing notes in class, the students can use instant messenger to call you names behind your back.
Of course, with a good packet sniffer, you can snatch the notes from their grasp and read them aloud. Just like with paper!
...and it degenerated into the teacher saying "stop touching the keyboard" every five minutes. No matter what concept for curriculum one comes up with, as long as the students can get onto the Internet, they will. I even was more creative than most, since I SSHed to the university solaris server, which was an arguably legitimate use, only to then launch a black and white console IRC session. I didn't get caught, but several other students with IM clients or GUI-based IRC clients did. Nothing punitive came of it though, because there were no real enforcement policies.
The class could have been much more efficiently run without computers, or at least without a live Internet connection. Some (like my case) will always find a way though the campus network, but if it can be minimized, that's the only way it will work.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Google for wiki. It's a website that anyone can change, keeping a changelog of course. You could have a lot of fun with one (or a few) of those, especially if any type of creative writing is to be going on.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Post an essay topic, let the kids review the submissions with mod points given to your favorite students. Just like Slashdot.
I say, leave technology out of English. Time would be better spent teaching the way that it has worked for hundreds of years - without the computer. Sure, computers can aid those with good typing skills in getting a paper done faster, but they far and away are useless in such courses as a teaching aid. If it were an engineering course, I would say differently - the world has changed much through the transition from slide rules to calculators to computers. But leave English out of it.
My wife taught an English writing course for several years (to non-native speakers) and used some Perl scripts I wrote for her to do things like forums (where the students were required to participate in online discussions about topics of interest to them) and a "random topic generator" (where a topic like what would appear on the TOEFL would pop up, and they had 30 minutes to write an essay on it). My wife also did the old-fashioned thing and had the students turn in papers, but she would type them up and post them online so that the students could see how each other did. She must have done something right, 'cause the students always loved her class.
I suppose what I'm recommending are forums. Never really used weblogs, so I can't comment on that.
Use the computers only where it makes sense.
The Weblogs are a good idea, because it allows the students to critique each others' papers on their at their convenience. And of course the Internet is a great research tool.
However most teachers fall victim to the temptation of using computers too often. Putting today's lesson into Flash may be "cool", but it doesn't help the student learn the material. English is about the written word, not about the latest technology.
Also, if you use the computers on a regular basis, there will always be a few students with poor computer skills or who crash the machine that will demand immediate attention. This iterrupts the flow of the class and cuts into precious class time.
Think twice about trying any of the suggestions here. Because college classes should be about learning first, using technology second (or third, or fourth...)
Why not? Well for starters it's not very relevant in a non-technical course to ask your students to become programmers. Its one thing to ask them to use something like Slashcode but kinda pointless to get them into modifying it without taking away from the course itself.
I'm an instructional technologist for a large university, and your concern here is one I find myself discussing with a lot of faculty lately.
Here are some precautions and some ideas:
* Be careful how much you require your students to learn in order to use the tools you choose -- frustration with technology will overcome any benefit from the tools.
* Identify and use 'peer experts' in your class to help you teach the basics.
* Using Blogging in a writing class is a fantastic way for your students to gain ownership of their writing online, but you'll have to work hard to encourage anything like collaboration, peer reviewing, or even quality. This is a good use for a detailed syllabus.
* An easy way of supplementing a Blog is to require the students to build a web-based portfolio on which they can post edited 'highlights' from their blog.
* Be precise about your requirements. I recommend giving seperate credit for 'participation' and 'attendance' online. This means that they have to do something meaningful to get the 'participation' points, but by simply posting anything they'll earn the 'attendance' points. Sounds hokey, but it really works to show students how to go beyond just posting to posting something worthwhile.
Okay . . . enough edu-speak. Let the technophiles sound off, because I'm curious to hear what these creative minds will offer as alternatives to blogging.
--- Brian Richard
As time goes on, I keep discovering that more and more commonly-used cliche's trace back to famous pieces of literature. (ie, "Neither a borrower, nor a lender be", "Good fences make good neighbors", "Out, out.. damned spot!", etc.). It surprises me how ignorant most people (including me) are about where these came from.
Now, looking back on my English experiences, I think it would have been pretty cool if each student were given a phrase and they had to use the net to find out what literature it originally came from and have to read enough of the surrounding text to be able to describe the context of the scene where the phrase occured (like Lady MacBeth trying to wash the blood off, etc).
Computers have created a society without attention spans or connection to the real world around them. Writing is a physical activity that should take time to produce quality results. Blogs are useless and a horrible waste of time. Please have your students write well not in excess.
Check out this article from one of Americas best essayist/poet/fiction write
The phpBB Community Forum is an example of the software in use, if you want to get an idea of its capabilities. All open source. I'm not involved with the project, just a happy user. :-)
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
And since I'm replying to an "interesting" post, mine may not be flagged FLAIMBAIT... maybe :)
Computers are a tool. In this setting, they'll be a distraction. They're not going to make a very non-technical class like this more interesting. They'll just provide an outlet for disinterested people to keep themselves busy.
Back in my day, we used books and notebooks. When it came time to write a paper (a formal effort, not a weblog), we did use a computer. But that was not during class.
I think you really need to look elsewhere for ways to get students interested and involved. Computers will be a mistake.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
He has been playing for about 7 years now. I asked him about the character he plays... and he could have gone on for hours. Read some of the "Role Play Logs". Amazing. And amazing that they're ephemeral - imagine if every action were logged! We could spend years just as spectators, watching wars and communities from hundreds of different perspectives.
--Just the place for a snark!
In that context, they're going to be using a lot of AIM slang, announce on the first day that it's an English class, and you expect English spelling and English grammar. In general I don't like computer classrooms, especially not for English. They get in the way of actual discussion. The best environment for a literature class is a big table where everyone looks everyone else in the face. Don't just ask your students to memorize the plot, ask them to think critically about the books. Why is this an important thing to read? What does it say about society? Literature is more than a fancy way of telling stories, don't let them discuss books on the level that they'd discuss an action movie, they're definitely capable of deeper analysis than "it was cool when..." Also, for high school English, don't underestimate short stories. You should definitely be assigning a lot of novels as well, but frequently young students are much better at thinking about short works critically. On the first day, have them read Hemingway's "A Clean Well Lighted Place" to get the ball rolling. You can read it in 10 minutes and the story obviously exists for a reason other than to tell about some event that happened to some characters. Also, I'd suggest The Bell Jar, Lord of the Flies, Huck Finn, and Catcher in the Rye as great books for ninth graders. If you're going to do any Shakespeare, Othello is probably the most accessible of the 4 tragedies. As far as the computers, I wouldn't use them for anything beyond in-class typewriters. Certainly don't make them do powerpoint presentations or webpages. What on earth does that have to do with English. Some sort of continuing reading response diary is a good idea, but make sure out-loud discussion and debate outweighs typing. Oh and they should be writing an essay a week, at least. It's a shame how poor the writing of most high schoolers is. Anyway, good luck.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
As I understand them, weblog programs are designed to allow one person to post an article, and then other people to comment on it. I do not think this is well suited to what you want to do, because 1) you will have multiple people posting multiple works, 2) you will probably not want to allow comments from random strangers. Using weblogs, each student would need to have his or her own weblog, which would make it more difficult for collaborative use of the type you envision.
For these purposes, a forum would be much better; forums allow for multiple, separate discussions to take place in a centralized area. They also allow the forum administrator to lock down the forum in such a way that only members can post messages, and the administrator gets to say who can be a member. This would help keep the discussion on topic. Each student's work would go in a different thread -- say Sally M. Haverforth posts the first draft of her argumentative essay on Milton's treatment of women in a thread called "S. Haverforth -- Milton: Masochistic Misogynist?". Subsequent comments from her peers would be replies to that initial posting, keeping the whole thing neatly organized.
If you have access to an appropriately equipped server, I recommend phpBB for the job: it's easy to set up and administer, open source, free of charge, and fairly easy to use.
Anonymous FTP'ing or such things. It took us one weekend with somebody leaving the anon FTP open for a nice 7200 new folders to be found on the server at work (no, it wasn't me)
Imagine teaching a basic math class to second graders and giving them calculators. They'll learn how to use calculators. They won't learn basic arithmetic.
You'll have to look very closely at what you want your students to learn. This might be the ability to spell-check and grammar-check their own writing without being dependent on a word processor. It might be to write regularly. It might be to read available text and review them.
Whatever it is, you will want to make sure the computer is nothing more than a tool - like a pencil. As several others have pointed out, it is very easy to abuse computers in a classroom setting. Access to the Internet is very hard to control completely and IM/IRC are not much more effective than group discussions.
The main benefit of computers might be minimizing paper. Sending the assignments and notes to each computer and having students do their assignments on the computer to send to you could be a great savings in paper.
I was taking one day at a time, but then several days got together and ambushed me. (from a Rhymes with Orange comic)
Since i've been thinking a lot recently about becoming a highschool teacher, i just read it that way.
Anyway, yeah, make sure you teach them to be a bit more critical readers than me.
And apply for a room transfer. A computer classroom is a gimmick. Gimmicks have their place in highschool - it's your job to hold their attention even if they'd rather be 100 miles away, but in college anyone who doesn't feel like learning can just leave. The computers will only distract the students. They can post to a blog using library computers or their own computers during time outside of class. I promise you that your class will go better if you get a better room. Ideally one with a table like I talked about above.
Oh and you weren't very clear in your question: is this an English class as in books and composition, or teaching the English language to those who don't know it? There are a variety of useful computer applications for learning language. Literature on the other hand is for dead trees and human discussion. Your students will be reading their email and not listening if you put computers in front of them.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
Will your students be able to type?
Do they have experience using a computer?
Are they comfortaqble using a mouse?
Do they know where the any key is?
The first thing I was taught in my teacher ed classes was not to assume any prior knowledge.
My advice would be to forget the computer room for teaching English. If not your class will turn into a computer class.
Now if there is an additional "writting lab" or something like that that isn't instructional, but hands on (in otherwords the students are expected to be doing something rather than lectured at) that is a great use for a computer lab. Each student can use the time to do what they need to do.
#include
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
One thing to investigate when you are setting this up is your school's policies on student privacy. At my university, at least, we have to be a little careful about letting students see other students' work. I often do (low-tech) peer review sessions; I will have students read drafts of each others' papers and give comments. It is all anonymous, because in my classes I never have students put their names on any assignment or exam; I do it all my grading by the last 4 digits of their ID numbers. And it is voluntary; I do this on the day papers are due, and those who choose to participate in the peer review get an extension to make corrections. If you choose not to participate, you simply turn in your final draft that day (and leave class early!). Still, my dean told me last term that I need to start having students sign a sheet in which they formally waive their right to privacy and agree to participate in the review.
This post is dedicated to all of those
I adhere to the other extreme: school computers should not be in "computer labs". Students should be using them all the time: taking notes, looking up references on the internet, IMing relevent data to classmates without disturbing the class as a whole, etc. Yeah, this can be abused. But if students are not motivated and involved in the classwork, they'll find ways to goof off, period.
Don't take my word for it. Look at schools that have followed this philosophy. Higher test scores, increased attendance, increased interest in writing...
My freshman year of college I had an English professor who focused on teaching us to write for an online audience.
To illustrate the difference between writing for print and writing for the web, one of our projects was to write a research paper and then adapt the content for a website. She taught us the bare basics of HTML, as well as some design styles.
But the main thing she focused on was how we had to adapt the content for the medium. Paragraphs had to be much shorter--preferably not paragraphs at all, but rather a list of bullet points. As a rule of thumb, she told us that we had to cut the length of the information to 25% of the length of the paper. Much less than that and you lose important information; much more and you lose the interest of the audience.
Also, she demanded that the websites be readable in any page order. No fair making users click through the pages in order, because they simply won't do it. So while you can lay out a nice long cohesive argument in a research paper, you can't do that in a website. You have to post your conclusions right on the home page, and then have links to other pages that have supporting material, but in such a way that each page can be read without having read or seen any of the other pages.
Competant communication in online media is a deceptively difficult skill, so if you can teach your students a few simple things like that (and if they actually learn) you will have helped them immensely.
This is not to say that you will end up with a bunch of people who are morons critiquing everybody else's work and ending up with them all dumbing down even more, but it's a possibility. Another possibility is that they'll all rise to a level of Borg-like hive mind and produce amazing work. Personally, I'd bet on the former more often than the latter. Although in classroom settings people often open up the door to peer review and discussion about works and ideas, it's almost always moderated and on subject, so that the instructor/moderator immediately has the opportunity to call "Bullshit" when Sally is full of it, or "Bravo" when she has a deep insight. If you've got blogs gone crazy, you don't have that control.
Peer review on something technical probably works much better because you're focused on getting something done, and on getting the correct results.
It might be better if we knew what type of English class this is? Are you teaching them the basics of the English language? Are you teaching creative writing? Is it literature, comparative or not? Is it focused on a particular style of writing and literature? English covers so many different things that the possibilities for effective use of technology are really different for each of them.
But something that you probably should do if you don't pay heed to the many people telling you to get the heck out of hte computer lab for the English class is something I've seen for business meetings. They're systems which are essentially whiteboards where students can post questions online for you to cover during the lecture, as well as comments, anonymous or not. So if you're covering Wuthering Heights and aren't properly covering the psychosis of Heathcliff, someone can say something like "Please cover more Heathcliff's obvious lack of proper seratonin function" or even just "slow down, you're going too fast" and you (and/or everybody else) can see and/or respond live.
I have taken 3 graduate classes that were internet based. My experience is that unless I just absolutely enjoy the subject being taught then forcing me to do online that which could be done, the real interactive way, in class is a horrible waste of your students' time. So,please don't rob your students of the valuable input that comes from the spontaneous interaction that can only happen in a classroom setting, especially when it comes to asking for critiques of one another. Doing this in class or face to face can save lots of their time. However, you can have students post the process that a particular paper is going through; their changes and what not. For instance: documenting in a blog what he/she incorporated from student X's critique. I have six years of paid teaching experience in Spanish and just as many in other areas on a volunteer basis...
Giving an elite few the ability to moderate posts on the basis of favoritism barely works on Slashdot, let alone a high school classroom.
Imagine the resentment that could be generated towards the class mods for weighted moderation.
Imagine the abuse of power that a mod could use against a classmate they didn't like.
Teachers have favored students, no question. But giving mod points on that basis would undermine at least the illusion of fairness.
I think the only reason Slashdot works at all is the relative anonymity of the posters. Most moderation here seems to be on the basis of the posts alone.
If you use Slashcode in the classroom , give everyone a mod point per topic. I think it will save you a lot of headache later.
If anyone thinks this is some sort of commentary about our beloved Slashdot , you might be right. I'm only a little bitter about never getting any mod points myself.
This sounds like 1998 style overenthusiasm for the net.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
Warning: the book was originally bundled with a CD with all the Perl source files in Mac format. (Sad how often this happens.) Perl interpreters on other platforms don't grok this, so they withdrew this printing and replaced it with a corrected version. The screwed-up version was sold off to remainder houses. You can save money buying the screwed up copies, but you have to convert the files, or download corrected files.
Usually the way these things work is by comparing against a giant database of "papers available on the web" and using various algorithms for judging similarity. This catches at least 95% of people who downloaded a paper from the web and made minor changes to it. In CS, where submissions are usually electronic, profs will often augment this database with all previous submissions for the course, sometimes dating back a decade or so. This catches at least 95% of people who copied an assignment from a friend who took the class a year or two ago (or even someone who graduated 5 years ago) and made minor changes (like search-replace on variable names, or some minor structural reworking) to it. Obviously this is harder to do in the humanities, unless you require electronic submissions in some format parsable as text or you OCR everything turned in.
As for unattributed quotes, you're certainly correct there. It's a completely intractable problem: the only way to know for sure that a particular sentence (or paragraph) was not plagiarized from somewhere is to check it against every single paragraph ever written in the history of the written word. Checking against some common sources might work decently though, especially if limited to a specific field (i.e. you can probably catch a significant percentage of plagiarized paragraphs in an anthropology paper by using a database of the 1000 most-cited anthropology books/papers).
But in any case, these things are mainly targetted at outright cheating: copying entire essays or large portions of essays from someone else.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
One very nice implementation of the wiki concept is TWiki. My school's CS department has its own TWiki set up, divided into subwebs for many different courses. The courses on our wiki are almost all Computer Science courses, but there are a few First Year Seminar webs (located here, here, and here) that might give you some ideas as to how to use a wiki in a non-technical class.
I agree with the above poster.
In the early 90's I worked on a project sponsored by AT&T to install classrooms of the future in a few universities. While there are undoubtedly things we did poorly and have been improved upon, one of the most striking findings of the project was that some classes did very poorly in the room. They had booked a variety in the theater the first year and found while some technology & science classes obviously benfitted a lot, other classes such a arts & history had a harder time in the room than in a normal classroom.
A few of the findings:
* students often appeared more distracted
* time spent learning software was not made up in efficiency
* less personal contact with the professor & with the material
* transient failures would disrupt the class
If you are searching for ways to use the classroom i would wager that at least to a degree you will be changing your course from english to one that also involves learning about computers or techniques such as blogs. Is that really what you want to teach? If it was me i would seriously consider asking for a room change or for students to turn off the computers during the class but i'm no professor.
Don't get me wrong they had great uses but i think the biggest thing we learned (somewhat as suspected) was that they are not for everything.
And, your Weblog idea falls in the memory space. You are trying to save the written conversations with one or many in a chronological fashion. So, in a way you are trying to create an institutional memory.
You could show your students what a wonderful "institutional memory" Google is. Do searches or exact quotes by remembering just a few words of the quote. By showing how easy it is, you can teach your students to be more precise in their use of references and paraphrasing ideas.
You could also show the students a wealth of english literature on the web that is freely available, You could introduce them to efforts like the Guttenburg project http://www.gutenberg.net/ and let them know that good books don't have to be expensive or out of easy reach locked up in some library somewhere.
You could explain to the students as to how things can be so easily checked for plagiarism, that it is better to give credit where it is due rather than claim it. It might help cultivate a new generation that has no hesitation in acknowledging where the ideas came from - thus, later allowing for a better public discourse in their civic life.
You could show them the power of weblogs in the evolution of ideas, by exposing the various stages of idea development to criticism by peers - seen and unseen. Though a lone author can come up with a great work after being in isolation, I think the probability if a great work is higher if it is exposed to some criticism as the ideas are coalescing in the writers mind. You could also introduce them to literary discussion groups.
You could expose your students to the chunking of ideas in electronic and cyberspace , because ideas have to be expressed in screenfuls, and thus a sort of an unnatural frame is created around the idea. You could also expose them to the different style of organization of chunks of ideas needed when the reader has some element of choice in deciding the sequence. If there is another post on this subject soon, I will try to put more of my thoughts across. I think, as long as you keep you focus correct, and not get caught in the computing aspect, by explore the networking aspect, you can't go wrong. After all, what is writing - it is just a network of words and ideas.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
You want "Cool ideas"? It sounds to me like the computers in your classroom are there for novelty value rather than education purposes.
Focus on your job, which is teaching English, grading your students' papers, and discussing the appropriate literature.
J.R.R. Tolkien never had a computer, and he wrote masterpieces. Twain, Dickens, Kipling, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Melville, and Poe didn't have computers; can you imagine how computers would have affected their skills?
J.K. Rowling doesn't even use a word processor; she just writes her Harry Potter masterpieces in long hand on a yellow pad of paper. (That's a bit extreme.)
How many of your students are going to win a Pulitzer Prize or a Nobel Prize in literature? How many of your students will write a book worthy of Oprah's Book Club (TM)?
You should concentrate on that. If you want to be "innovative" in education, make sure you have a set of measurable results that you will achieve. Otherwise if you want an excuse to play with computers, switch to another job. Don't waste your students' or taxpayers' money just so you can goof around pretending to be "innovative".
Obviously YANAT. As someone who is, let me respond to this:
Just as you can't please all of the people all of the time, you are not going to have every student totally interested and completely focused all of the time. The only way you might be able to achieve this (for a brief period) is with some theatrics which probably adds nothing to the lesson as a whole.
Now, lets say a student mind wanders off... if there are few other distractions one of two things are likely to happen:
- The student will daydream a bit then snap out of it, or
- The student will daydream for the rest of the class.
Either way it's an isolated student. They may miss the lesson entirely, but that's their problem later on.
Now, lets create an environment where it is easy for someone to access the web, IRC, IM, etc:
The same student drifts off and decides to check, say, Slashdot. They start reading an article. Decide to post a response, etc. Suddenly 20 minutes has gone by. At this point even if they turn back to the lesson odds are they've fallen way behind in it and will have trouble following it. This can lead to less than brilliant questions about content covered 10 minutes before - wasting other peoples time (and irritating those who are paying attention). They may distract and disturb those around them.
You're right when you say if they're not interested they'll find ways of goofing off. But when it's a student on their own they aren't likely to disturb others, or encourage them to stop paying attention. If they're ICQing classmates, banging away during a lecture, and what not, they are far more likely to be a disturbance to others.
Since we are in networked computer lab, and actually need it for our classes, this sort of thing can happen. The students who are totally wiped out from work and need a few Zzzz's I'll tend to leave alone. Those who are just goofing off, well, they get called on a lot. Hearing your name and looking up to see the lecture has stopped and everyone is staring at you tends to encourage people to follow along.
Learning is work, nobody likes work. It's a balance though, a sterile and boring class will hold nobody's attention. You try to mix things up and keep it interesting as much as you can while keeping it relevant... but sometimes rules and enforcement are needed for the good of both the distracted student, as well as the class as a whole.
(and this is coming from a one time class clown turned into College teacher. If I ever had myself as a student, I'd have kicked my own ass!)
Blockwars: you know you wanna play.
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
Moodle.org is an open source package that allows several features of what everyone has been mentioning here. A neat feature is the journal that allows the teacher to critique their writings privately. It also has forums, online quizes, etc.
What, me worry?
If you had said that you would be teaching a computer science class, a biology class, or any type of class other than English, I wouldn't have been such a picky bastard.
The second year of my teaching career I had a principal who said that the teacher himself/herself was the curiculum. At the time I disagreed in that some classes necessitated the transference of knowledge regardless of who or what the teacher was.
Several years later I now see his point.
If the class is about computers and how to use them in a particular fashion then go for it. However, it is apparent that the class is about language and the use thereof to communicate. Typing on a computer is a slow means of communicating. It follows then that precious time can/might/will be lost via that means.
Jabberwocky is fine on OfficeXP - sorry.
:)
I always liked this:
Eye have a spelling chequer,
It came with my Pea Sea,
It plainly marques for my revue
Miss steaks aye can knot sea.
Eye strike a quay and type a whirred
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write,
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as the misses ache is maid
It nose before two long
And aye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it,
I am sure your pleased to no,
Its letter perfect awl the weigh,
My chequer tolled me sew.
Wonderful.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Well if its for an English class, get them to do something interesting witht a wiki. Weblogs are all well and good but people get enough practice critiquing others work.
With a Wiki you could see how they go when they have to work together to get something done. Simple wiki software such as UseMod, might not cut the mustard but you could try setting up a PediaWiki based site for them to work with.
I'd imagine that there would be lessons in online anonymity to be learnt here as well....