Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Practicing netiquette...

With the whole Facebook/MySpace/YouTube revolution, there's quite a fine line when to comes to libel and freedom of expression.
Here's an interesting article that appeared in Macleans primarily concerning teachers and students.
One day I did a search on Facebook to see if there were any groups just for teachers--as kind of a networking thing--and the search result was quite frightening. There are groups that promote hate about teachers and the majority of comments left on the walls of those groups are extremely defamatory in nature. Furthermore, many students create groups about their peers at school entitled "I hate so and so", etc.
I am in favour of freedom of expression... but I do think that it crosses the line at times and is just plain mean.
"Students have been disparaging teachers long before the Internet's inception. But placing those comments online turns it into a whole new ball game, said University of Toronto sociology professor Barry Wellman. 'It's one thing saying "The teacher sucks," to your friends over a beer or a cigarette or a Coke,' he said. 'That's slanderous, but nobody really cares about that. When you put it on the web it's libelous because it can be read by anybody and can hurt the person's reputation.'"
Another example of this appeared in Seattlepi.com, where some students made a rude video of their teacher (without her knowledge) and posted it on YouTube for the whole world to see.

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