Yuck, two dreadful pieces of news from TechDirt. They are interesting, I think, because they demonstrate what a struggle it really is when these new technologies hit mainstream use. There are some real issues to wrestle with!

The first story is perhaps good news, about vindication. A school in NJ today decided to settle out of court for $117,500 with a student who had been suspended for blogging critically about his school.

Second story I’ll just repost verbatim from the original story:

…from the blame-it-on-the-web dept…
All but 400 of the 3,000 students at a San Antonio high school didn’t show up yesterday after somebody posted some messages on MySpace saying some kids were going to show up at the school with machine guns. This sort of stupidity is nothing new, but apparently, since it went out over a web site, the clueless school administrators want retribution, saying MySpace should be held “accountable”, with the district’s lawyers deciding if they should file a lawsuit. An administrator says that letting kids post unmonitored messages is “asking for trouble” — so should all these kids’ phone conversations be tapped and their face-to-face conversations be monitored as well? MySpace and other internet services aren’t creating these problems and aren’t to blame for them; they just make the spreading of information (sometimes known as communication) quicker and more efficient.

Please, do us all a favor and try to tell one person you know who is less web-savvy than yourself about this story and how inane it is. Blogs enable some serious work to be done in the world, and the only thing worse than people saying “blogs? isn’t that just people writing about their cats?” would be “blogs? is that like that MySpace thing that kids use to say they’re going to shoot up the school?”

According to the original story on San Antonio’s WOAI.com News one school district official says, “This particular web site has been a pain for all Bexar County schools for a long time now, and it just seems that the owners of MySpace-dot-com should be held accountable.”

What if said post had been made on Blogger-dot-com or on En-dot-Wikipedia-dot-org or any other stinkin’ place in the world that is no longer a one-way means of communication? Terribly sorry Mr. school district official, if this giant shift in human communication has the entire Bexar County school district frightened then maybe you should sue. But I hope you know what you’re getting into!

Not to only make light of such things; I don’t know what the answer is. But for an educator to be so provincial as to so completely miss the boat about the last 3 years of the web is a real disservice to the young people he is supposed to be preparing for the world around them.

If you need a reminder about the seriousness of blogs, or a shot in the arm to remember their potential, go visit my friends at The Committee to Protect Bloggers.

Ps. Dear dumb kids, stop posting things like that.

Technorati Tags: MySpace, web2.0, blogging, censorship, control, education, kittens