For me the key piece in article was the description of the judges ruling on the motions before him. His point that since a landmark case in 1979, "times have changed significantly" and that "off campus speech can become on campus speech" at "the click of a mouse" is the heart of the matter. The ultimate ruling was that the administration was right in apllying punishment.
If Web 2.0 tools have the power to make a fundamental changes in education as they have made fundamental changes in society, does it also point a dagger at the very political structure of schools? I don't mean to go overboard here but as I have comtemplated what Web 2.0 learning looks like in schools, it is clear that it can look very different than 30 seats and a desk at the front. That classroom structure is a subset of school structure. Much of what teachers end up doing is crowd management and social engineering.
"Nice quiet line please, others are working"
"Line leader stop at the corner"
"You can get a drink at the fountain but lets make it 1,2,3 that's enough for me"
"That's the bell, you should be out of the hallway and into your rooms"
Much of school structure is a traditional top dowm management with information and control flowing from administrators, to teachers to students. In so many ways the school is the agent of social norms and cultural transmission. We carry out an important mission of socialization and societal normalization.
I heard a phrase way back in my college days - the massage of culture. There is a lot of what schools do that is the massage of culture, the good and and the bad of it.
The recent election is just one of a series of examples of how to use the Internet and social tools to go "outside the system" to influence the hoi poli directly. Viral videos, twitter storms, and the explosive growth of Facebook for the bayboomer set all point to the growing use of social media to influence, change, exploit and cajole the multitudes to action.
What happens when those techniques are used by students to go outside the systems of their schools? In some ways student unrest and protest has always been possible but never so much as with the tools we have at our disposal today. At some level we cannot stop it, the revolution is all around us, it is here. As we take advantage of the power of the tools and transform our classrooms and champion the roles of social media, to "disrupt" traditional classrooms and teaching, do we also not lay bare the path for true social disruption for our students?
Some of the administrators in the Burlington school district have moved on, some in part because of the fall out of this incident. Like it or not, for better or worse, Avery Doninger made school change happen with the click of a mouse and teh use of a Web 2.0 tool. The judge is saying that the administrators were within their rights to apply consequences to those actions.
It may be a moot point.
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Internet Free Speech Ruling Favors Burlington School Administrators -- Courant.com - Annotated
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But in a ruling on several motions for summary judgment Thursday, U.S. District Judge Mark R. Kravitz rejected Doninger's claims that administrators at Lewis S. Mills High School violated her rights to free speech and equal protection and intentionally inflicted emotional distress when they barred her from serving as class secretary because of an Internet post she wrote at home.
Kravitz's ruling relied in part on the ambiguity over whether schools can regulate students' expression on the Internet. He noted that times have changed significantly since 1979, when a landmark student speech case set boundaries for schools regulating off-campus speech.
Now, he wrote, students can send e-mails to hundreds of classmates at a time or post livejournal.com entries that can be read instantly by students, teachers and administrators.
"Off-campus speech can become on-campus speech with the click of a mouse," Kravitz wrote.
Kravitz cited previous rulings and held that school administrators were entitled to qualified immunity, which shields public officials from lawsuits for damages unless they violate clearly established rights a reasonable official would have known.
Kravitz reasoned that because the nature of student speech rights on the Internet is still evolving, the officials could not reasonably be expected "to predict where the line between on- and off-campus speech will be drawn in this new digital era.- This is the key piece in the article. - post by stevesoko
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Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.
