After the first character design session at the beginning of March I began to note down some of the points coming through from our discussions that morning and found that I wanted also to include images the students had created and to comment on their work. To ensure anonymity I ascribed a capital letter to each student.

This morning during our first session after the Easter break we talked about my development project for the University of Plymouth, different types of research, and read through the Art of Conversation ethics protocol. We discussed copyright and how I needed their written consent to publish any of their drawings on the site, and that their work would only be used for education or research.

Some students said that they wanted people to copy and use any of their drawings, designs or animations that I'd included on the AoC site.

On the AoC character weblog this morning, except for me, only the students could identify themselves and their work. But every student said that they wanted to be identified - they wanted people to know who they were and what they thought.

I told them that I wanted to include each of their names in an alphabetical list of 'thanks to' in the final project report - as I would do for a project outside an academic context, but that in order to acknowledge their contribution to Art of Conversation I'd need permission from the university's Ethics Committee.

One of the students - I think it was student uncle snail, then suggested that they each choose an alias for me to use in the character weblog. Genius suggestion - here are their chosen aliases:

uncle snail
Spirit Raptor
BazzaDJ
Rhino
Sicktrus
Alias
Paper Cuts
Deafo
Kira Drakengord
CRouCHiNG MuNKee
MCRSean
LIKEWIZE
Cyborge
wiggzy
Disco

So, I've replaced the previous anonymised capital letter code for each student with their chosen alias. A colleague who is helping me with the web publishing has elected to be known as Lord Lipson.