Censorship and the Personal/Professional divide
In May 2008 I wrote a post entitled What is a VLE? In it, I discussed the ins and outs of various VLEs and linked it to an EdTechRoundup podcast in which I was a participant. I made a passing comment that compared one type of VLE to another. The company whose VLE product I did’t rate very well threatened me (via my school) with legal proceedings. 😮
The upshot was that I felt it was in my best interests to remove the ‘offending’ paragraph so as to not cause difficulties within my school. I replaced it with one that, in my eyes, was more damaging to the VLE vendor: that they’d almost forced me to remove any criticism (however slight) by referring to ‘legal proceedings’ in their communication with my school.
I’ve now added a disclaimer to my blog, saying that my opinions are not that of my employer (school or Local Authority). It does, however, bring up the issue of where the personal ends and the professional begins – and vice-versa…
Have you any experience of this? What was the outcome?
