Manifesto for Informal Digital Journaling
This is a 2024 update of an earlier version I posted, in which I outlined a student bloggers’ bill of rights and responsibilities. In this update, I have created a manifesto for informal lifelong learners using digital journals.
Independent Lifelong Writers in an informal writing space will:
- Seek to outline their own mission statement, explaining to their intended audiences some of the key reasons why they write.
- Recognize that they hold complete control and responsibility for modifying their own privacy options for disclosure of personal content.
- Exercise their right to choose not to participate in dialogues or knowledge-sharing and opt out of the act of writing altogether. They are not bound by sticking to a routine of regular posting. They have the right to choose to not disclose personal experiences and not to feel pressured to write for any audience.
- Choose to refuse to participate in activities in which they feel uncomfortable. They can also choose to adopt a pseudo, “masking self”, or alias, and write in another’s voice.
- Accept that what is discussed within a private learning space among others is not intended to be shared outside that learning space, and that others need to respect others’ privacy.
- Can opt out of being assessed by external validators, facilitators or mentors and instead bargain with their validators for a more meaningful assessment process;
- Request an external validator/mentor as a role model to act as a guest assessor.
- Determine the extent of self-disclosure, to whom they will disclose, and for what purposes;
- Recognize that other writers have no obligation to respond to their posts, and they in turn have no obligation to respond to others’ posts.
- Need to understand that one must strive to balance their motivations for digital journaling between both intrinsic and extrinsic sources, and recognize they need to write for their own intrinsic reasons, seeking feedback from others, drafting ideas for projects, and for meeting personal goals.
- Be allowed to opt out of participating in digital journaling entirely.
- Outline their own expectations for engagement with others’ ideas – for example, whether it involves one or more of the following activities: reading, commenting, lurking; linking.
- Expect to retain posting rights, including the rights to edit, delete, restrict or widen access to their contributions, as well as the right to copy these posts to other personal/public digital and analog spaces.
- Understand they need to notify peers that comments linked to posts created within a “walled” or secured writing space will be made publicly available, enabling other commenters to edit or delete potentially sensitive content beforehand.
- Recognize that they are answerable for any content created, and recognize their ideas are available in perpetuity once released into the public domain.
- a) Accept that their posts using others’ ideas require attribution, either by citing the author and title of the resource, or by linking to the post, or creating a trackback (if this option is available).
