13 August 2009, 10:31

13 August 2009, 18:00

Hi Caitlin,

As I know one of the core principles is that Mahara is a user driven application with the User determining levels of access. So, there is no chance that some users can see the artefact of the other users unless such permissions are granted. There was a discussion of such kind on the old forum. You can have a look here http://mahara.org/node/319

Also if you look at the roadmap of Mahara 1.2 you'll see that Stats & Reporting functionality is going to be implemented. It will help to see activity on Mahara.

Hope this helps.

Julia

13 August 2009, 18:50

15 August 2009, 19:01

16 August 2009, 19:31

Hi - nope. Though you have to ask yourself whether you actually want to act as big brother to everyone . Firstly, it's impractical when you get more than a few users (and also somewhat a violation of their privacy, when a portfolio is supposed to be for them to reflect in). Also, if you claim to have a "fully monitored" system, you open yourself up to complaints if you don't catch something 

Mahara does have a "log in as another user" feature for admins, which can help with specific instances of abuse, as well as a feature to report objectionable views. There could probably be other features added to help discover abuse, though we'd be very reluctant to add features that allow admins to spy on people 

I am interested though - are there specific requirements (laws or otherwise) that mean people have to monitor systems in certain ways? 

18 August 2009, 15:49

hi Nigel, good question.  We've been approached by a number of schools on the subject of monitoring and legal requirements have been cited as a reason.  How is this managed by schools in NZ? 

philip

18 August 2009, 18:24

Interesting topic! Certainly one most HE institutions have to consider. It very much sounds like finding out what the legal requirements are in your particular country and constructing ‘site disclaimers’ accordingly. I think it’s not an option to expect hosts of personal web spaces (e.g. Mahara) to fully monitor all activities to prevent copyright infringement, defamatory messages etc.

It could also well be that copyright in Web 2.0 environments is still a grey area and no clear recommendations are available.

A good site I found is http://www.web2rights.org.uk/documents.html   but I am still looking for an Australian equivalent.

Christian

18 August 2009, 18:49

Hi Christian,

In terms of higher education ePortfolio systems are supposed to fill the gap between the institutional focus of an LMS and the social networking world of Web 2.0. I think that, if institutions start controlling personal ePortfolios, they won't be trusted by users anymore. ePortfolios should be supported, but not controlled or restricted. At the same time students (users) having ePortfolio are responsible for the information they provide. No one would rely on the information which obviously violates copyright laws.

18 August 2009, 19:27

The mahara site has a pretty good description of the administraor and user obligations. (copied below)

This is pretty generic and could be localised by referring to your countries copyright  law.

There are also privacy conditions on mahara that are pretty generic but could be customised to refer to meeting your countries privacy laws.

When uploading files the user also has to agree to copyright conditions so the onus is on the user.

Our obligations

The mahara.org Site Administrators will undertake all reasonable steps to provide all users with a safe, secure and operational electronic portfolio system. If at any time you feel your rights as a user have not been upheld or you have any questions regarding the below, please Contact Us immediately.

mahara.org will occasionally be unavailable for short periods of time as we release new system features. We will endeavour to provide some notice of outages, but occasionally outages may occur without warning.

You are encouraged to report objectionable material or inappropriate behaviour to the Site Administrator immediately. We will ensure the matter is investigated in a timely manner.

Site Administrators may access your portfolio and its contents at anytime, however they will avoid doing so unless specifically required to support your use of mahara.org or as per these Terms and Conditions.

Your obligations

The Privacy Statement should be considered an extension of these Terms and Conditions and be read by all users.

All files and content you upload to mahara.org are subject to New Zealand Copyright legislation. You are responsible for ensuring you have appropriate permission to reproduce and publish any work that is not your own.

You must not use your portfolio to store or display offensive material. If the Site Administrator receives report of any objectionable material within your portfolio, your account will be suspended and your access to mahara.org frozen.

If the Site Administrator receives report of any inappropriate behaviour on your part, where it relates to mahara.org, your account will be suspended and your access to mahara.org frozen.

Inappropriate behaviour includes misuse of the objectionable material reporting system, intentionally attempting to load files with virus content, placing objectionable or excessive feedback or comments on any other users portfolio and any other behaviour deemed to be nuisance or offensive by the Site Administrator.

Any unsolicited contact you receive as a result of personal information you have publicly released via your portfolio is your responsibility, however any misconduct in behaviour from users of the system should be reported to the Site Administrator immediately. We may occasionally make minor adjustments to our Terms and Condition to reflect changes to the system and in response to user feedback. As such we suggest you check the Terms and Conditions each time you visit this site. We will however notify users of any major changes to the Terms and Conditions via the mahara.org homepage.

18 August 2009, 20:35

There's probably a lot of monitoring policy that comes from legal requirements. Which is a shame really . In my opinion (and I'm just a coder so it's not based on any expertise or experience), asking site administrators to police everything that goes on is totally unreasonable.

You could argue that because it's a website run by Bob, that Bob has the right to see everything on the site. And sure, he does. But on a lot of sites, the service is built around privacy - especially Mahara! It's pedagogically silly for us to allow admins to see everything easily, as users will lose trust in it. I know it's "security theatre" to suggest that people's data should be private on a website controlled by someone else, but the masses don't have the ability to set up their own sites, and indeed they lose the value of being together with others from their social network if they do. So they expect some kind of privacy in some situations.

Even if Bob is allowed/forced to police everything, this adds a prohibitively large burden on him to check everything that is going on. Can facebook seriously police the 200 million user accounts it has? Can Bob from Smalltown School police 400 user accounts day and night? I think not.. and the moment he gets it wrong, he has angry parents on the phone who have been lead to believe the system is somehow "safe".

Distribution, and sensible policy, is the solution. If everyone knows that people might abuse the system, but also know they can report abuse and understand the consequences, then things are far more manageable for everyone. We don't put barriers between lanes of the road everywhere, yet nobody chooses to drive on the wrong side of the road . Barriers for every road would be insanely expensive, the solution of barriers for high-speed roads only is a good balance between cost and safety.