Teen Blog Guidelines
One of our readers is in the process of creating an online book club for teens in the format of a blog. I commend his efforts to move the traditional book club to the world wide web!
The same reader asked about creating procedures for moderating posts and comments on the teen blog. He will not be the only staff person moderating the blog, so he has to develop a procedure for staff members to follow when inappropriate content is posted.
My initial response to his question, is to point out that although it’s possible that teens might make inappropriate posts and comments, it’s probably unlikely that this will happen in the forum of an online book club. Teens involved with the book club will likely want to participate in constructive ways, and will avoid language and topics that might be considered inappropriate.
However, in a world where the most harmless teen novels are challenged by parents and community members, I can understand the concern for establishing teen blog guidelines.
I would say that before developing procedures to handle inappropriate posts, one might one to start with some general blogging guidelines. Some of the guidelines for comment posting on the National Geographic Blog might be easily adapted for a teen book club blog:
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Please carefully review your comment before posting.
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Comments are lightly moderated. National Geographic Channel is not responsible for the content of posted comments.
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Feel free to speak your mind, but please be respectful to others.
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Keep comments on topic. Offensive and inappropriate comments will be deleted.
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For your personal safety, any posts containing or requesting personal information, including phone numbers, will be deleted.
After the guidelines have been established, it might be easier to develop procedures for handling inappropriate posts. My suggestion would be to create a method where teens have the opportunity to reconstruct posts that are deemed, “offensive.”Does anyone have additional tips for establishing teen blog guidelines? Please share your ideas by leaving a comment. Examples of teen blog guidelines are greatly appreciated!
Update: David Warlick created an Information Code of Ethics that can be used as a springboard for the development of youth blog guidelines. The document can be downloaded from Christopher Harris (Thank you for the info).
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for more thoughts and stepstones on guidelines for blogs and to have teens “reconstruct” entries themselves, i can highly recommend the following book. although it’s a bit old (2000) and blogs are not mentioned, it is still applicable:
COMMUNITY-BUILDING ON THE WEB
by Amy Jo Kim
http://www.naima.com/community/
wow! great stuff. thanks so much for your help. i’ll let you know when the finished product is up and running.
Catherine G said:
We are also in the same process of creating a summer blog instead of a reading club. I too was worried about inappropriate content but after talking with my supervisor who is much younger and wiser, I am not as stressed.
I was wondering could I adapt your protocol and use it for our blog rules of practise?
Thanks.
We are embarking on our third book blog summer for tweens (11-14)
Here are our rules for posting:
Stay on topic with your opinions and ideas.
Wait for a response before writing a second time.
Single word responses are not enough. Please say more about your opinion.
Respect everyone’s right to an opinion.
Ask your own book and reading-related questions.
Profanity, inappropriate language, or put-downs are not allowed.
Personal information such as Phone numbers, IM Screen names, or e-mail addresses are not allowed.
The last one was the hardest to enforce, but for each post we got an e-mail that allowed us to block the post, or user and post.