User profiles now private

FoxyLearning Fanatics,

After reviewing site usage and reassessing our company mission and strategy, I have decided to make user profiles on FoxyLearning completely private. This means your user profile will no longer be visible to other site members or the general public. If you are a student who “connects” your performance on a tutorial to a course, however, the instructor of that course will still be able to see your real name and tutorial progress and performance data (but that’s all).

Although I initially envisioned FoxyLearning to be a hub of all sorts of exciting interactions and discussions regarding the topics of our tutorials, this never really materialized. There are probably several reasons for this. Individuals taking a tutorial for a course probably engage in discussion of the topic in the classroom (or within the course’s learning management system if it is an online course). Individuals taking a tutorial for continuing education are probably not seeking the same kind of social engagement about the topic as those taking a course or, if they are, they probably seek such engagement elsewhere (with peers and colleagues in person, more robust social networking sites like Facebook or Twitter, discipline-specific discussion boards or mailing lists, etc.). And, of course, we never really made social or collaborative learning an emphasis on the site. Our recently launched BehaviorChangers website or our Facebook page might be better places to support that sort of thing.

Without active discussion forums or a reason for users to interact in a regular and meaningful way on the site, there isn’t much point in making user profiles public. I care deeply about the privacy of FoxyLearning users, and at this point I just don’t see any reason to expose any of your personal information to other users or the public (even if the information on the profiles was quite minimal). If you log in to the site and go to your account page, you’ll notice it now has a more streamlined look with only the information you really need to manage your account.

In the future we may reconsider the role social networking and learning might play on FoxyLearning.com and see a reason to once again support public user profiles. If we do, however, please be assured that you will have full control over the privacy of your information and everything will default to “private,” not “public”…unlike some other social networking sites that have been in the news lately!

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions you might have about this.

Best,
 Eric

P.S. An Introduction to Verbal Behavior will be launched within a week!

—
Eric J. Fox, Ph.D.
Owner & Director, FoxyLearning
fox@foxylearning.com | http://foxylearning.com

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