Study Curve

Personally, I don't see the purpose of having a private group. The goal of study curve is to help people by providing information in the form of answers to questions.

Having private groups would severely curtail the availability of this information to the casual user. Questions and answers should be posted and available to the greatest number of users (and guests) possible, especially if you are trying to raise capacity.

Frankly, I don't see the benefit of having a private group now or even in the future. You risk creating "cliques" on the site.

Those are my 2 cents worth.

Right now any user can see a private group (everything) but they can't contribute to the group. The proposal and what we will probably do is similar to myspace or facebook, where if you are not a member of a private group all you can see is the group name in a search but nothing else.

I understand what everyone is saying but i guess im confused with the question. Would you be able to see the group and not the people or would you be able to see niether?

What is the point of a private group if it isn't private...ya know...I'd say that if you have a private group then just group members should be able to see each other...Like I said, there would be no point if everyone could see them if it was on private...

That is one of the things that we have been discussing. I believe in keeping things simple and believe having three choices wouldn't be that beneficial. At this point I believe that I would rather opt to make a truly private group and a public group. I don't think that there would be much use for the intermediate if the other two existed. I personally greatly value a private group option, I just want to do what's best for the students.

Perhaps giving group managers as many choices as possible would help to ensure that the "private" option doesn't get overused/abused. For example, when creating a new group the user would need to choose 1 of 3 options: Public Edit/Public View -or- Private Edit/ Public View -or- Private Edit/Private View. A short description/explanation for each would be helpful as well.

Well having read the responses, I think it would be valuable to have both options available. I agree that there are times when privacy may be necessary. It would seem that if a room is private that the manager would need to take some responsibility for monitoring the content of that group to insure safety issues and not to censor academic content.

I can see the arguments for having private groups visible, but I think that for usability purposes, it would be more beneficial to have truly private groups. There are many subjects that people might feel more comfortable discussing in a closed group, as well as providing more security to the users. I think that the benefits to having private groups hidden outweigh the possible benefits to other users to be able to see discussions.

Being a part of the StudyCurve team, I would be glad to respond to this. There were a lot of decisions that had to be made and many of those decisions had many valuable arguments both ways. The privacy issue along with the posting of documents were both very "touchy". Our main purpose is making a place that students can benefit from. As of right now private groups are visible but not editable by the public, kind of like read/write protection. The thought process behind this is that if people are collaborating, let's say on the derivation of a complicated math formula, than that information is more than likely valuable to other users of the site. On the other hand we have the point that Frank brought up regarding privacy issues in let's say a class room. Both are valid points in our opinion and both have been thought of in great detail. The dificult part in my mind is that which value is more important. Unfortunately, I am not sure that one out ways the other. I don't know how to best address this issue and am excited to hear other feedback!

Well, I’m really struggling with this one. The first question I have is what is the current purpose of the choice between Private and Public? If all private group information is visible to the public, then what part of the group is actually “Private”? I guess this whole question is best answered by those creating the site. It’s a matter of vision really. What is the vision of Study Curve? What is the target audience? My perspective is one of K-12 public education. I can tell you definitively that most school districts, even large ones such as mine do not have and are not even close to having this type of “blogging” capability in-house. On the one hand that makes Study Curve an attractive option; however, on the other hand if teachers are going to use it with their classes, they are going to want/need the ability to have private groups. The other issue that Study Curve will face, even greater I think than the whole copyright infringement issue on the file attachment question, is that of security of student profile information. That will be the first question from every district level administrator, followed closely of course by “what’s the cost”. That being said and going back to the classroom teacher's perspective, there will be a need/want for groups where information that is shared may be “sensitive” and thus requiring some level of protection from the general public view. In a perfect world, Study Curve would never attract a single predator. Of course, we don’t live in a perfect world. In my opinion, Study Curve would be best served by allowing students and teachers alike to create profiles, seek the help of experts AND have the ability to create/participate in both public groups and truly private groups.

I believe that any conversation that should not be seen by others should take place some place other than studycurve.com. The whole purpose of this site is to provide opportunity for people to learn together and all educational conversation should be available to all.

Here are some pros and cons:

Pros: There might be some discussions that involve private issues.

Cons: Some conversations that take place would be a valid resource for people not in the group, there are no places to hide for inappropriate behavior, StudyCurve is designed to be an educational resource and all information should be available kind of like wikepedia