Everything Public?

So we had a visitor last week. Doesn’t matter who.

And while talking about our new digital student portfolio initiative, there was some concern about the public/private nature of putting young students’ work online. Understandably. It was something we’d been grappling with for a bit already, but mister visitor was quick with a response:

Just make it public.

The argument, I suppose, being that it makes things easy on the administration end. That it creates an environment/culture of “openness.” And so on.

But I’m not convinced. Not everything in the “real world” is open. In fact, we stress the ability to keep much of what we do private- from social networks to banking to forums, we cherish the ability to keep things isolated to a specific community.

So why would we take that ability from students?