Usage and Etiquette Policy

Overview

This is the Usage and Etiquette Policy for the Teachers' Research Exchange (T-REX) website and community. This document sets out the guidelines of practice for the user of the T-REX website (all pages within the t-rex.ie domain).

Membership of the Site and General Expectation of Responsibility

It is expected that membership of the T-REX site is made of up people with a professional stake in the domain of Education in Ireland. Non-exhaustively, the members will include: students of education courses in Irish colleges and universities, practising teachers at early years, primary, secondary, and further and higher levels, educational researchers in varied settings, members and officers of professional bodies.

There is a general expectation of responsibility from users – standards of politeness and etiquette typical of face-to-face interaction with professional colleagues are expected to apply. (It is in fact expected that the guidelines of this policy are “obvious” to most members, and are being stated explicitly for the sake of completeness.)

Users are expected to refrain from posts or sharing documents that are likely to be offensive to other users, and to address any queries or complaints about your activity in a careful and respectful manner.

“Cold” Contacts

It is the intention of the T-REX Team that the site be used to foster new collaborations, particularly those that cross professional settings. For educational research to be valuable, communication between different professional groups is essential, and will require new connections to be made. This means that a certain amount of “cold” contacting of other members is a normal use of the site, and should be expected by all users.

Users are expected to take care to ensure that they do not bombard others with cold requests. Some guidelines:

If a user has not made their professional setting public in their profile, it is likely that they do not wish to be contacted as a member of that setting (e.g. if you need to contact a registered teacher, contact only those people who have made their status as a registered teacher public).

If you are part of a group, ensure that everyone in the group knows what other users have been contacted, to prevent multiple requests to one person from the same group.

If an initial query goes unanswered, to not follow-up. This avoids pestering of other members of the site.

Ethical Posting and Data Protection

Posts made to the site, documents shared within T-REX groups, and other user-generated content are the responsibility of the users creating them.

Because posts made to the site, and documents shared, are the responsibility of the user making them, users should be generally aware of the requirements of data protection and principles of ethical consent. For instance, where users might be sharing data about students in their schools, those data be anonymised before posting, and shared only with the specific group of people who need access to the data.

Similarly, where items like photographs of school settings are posted, users should be aware of requirements of consent from those pictured to have their image shared.

Where there is uncertainty, users are encouraged to discuss these issues on T-REX with your professional colleagues before posting, and are also referred for guidance to the British Educational Research Association's Code of Ethics.

Please also make yourself familiar with the T-REX Privacy Statement.

 

Conflict Resolution

Where a given post or member's behaviour is considered problematic, it can be reported to the T-REX team via email at t-rex@mic.ul.ie.

Every effort will be made to resolve any conflict or issue through conversation and negotiation.

In some cases, however, where other approaches have been unsuccessful in resolving serious problems, the T-REX Team reserves the right to delete problematic content directly.

Where a user's behaviour is repeatedly problematic, and no other course of action is considered adequate to resolving very serious problems, users can be banned from the site.