ABSTRACT
Using data derived from students has fallen out of fashion, for good reasons. However, I make no apology for doing so here. In this chapter 1 quote from comments posted in an online forum over three years by successive groups of second-year undergraduate students. They were asked to post their immediate reactions to a specific documentary after the screening and before the following week's seminar discussion. I have used these comments as a guide to the kinds of practical ethical beliefs that are brought to bear in discussion of documentary. I believe they are more reliable than the comments posted in public online forums, simply because postings in online forums are anonymous and these class postings were always signed. So there was no covert direction of the conversations by those associated with the filmmakers (a characteristic of public online debates about feature films), and the participants were all known to each other. This gave the exchanges a different quality, and my moderation was confined to requiring expression in a more or less academic style. The comments revealed much that I did not know, from aspects of the films that I had not noticed, to the changing use of the word ‘manipulate’ from a pejorative term to a useful neutral term for the textual process itself. So if any of my students read this book, please accept my thanks for your input, which neither you nor I will be able to identify as all quotes have been anonymised
