Facebook

It's a good thing for the Teaching Carnival, otherwise I might have missed the Facebook controversy. A good summary is here, but there are also interesting things here and here and here and here.

A quick summary: Facebook is a site where people (primarily undergraduates) can form different groups for the purpose of social interaction. A group of students at Syracuse University formed a group specifically to ridicule a particular Teaching Assistant, and they posted some really nasty stuff. Their group came to the attention of the administration, and they were disciplined.

One thing that strikes me is how incredibly naive these students seem to have been about the process. One is quoted as saying,

I am horrified I had anything to do with what occurred and I still feel just horrible that I hurt another person’s feelings.

What in the world did she think was going to happen? If she had hired a skywriter to write those things over campus, it would have been a good guess that the TA's feelings would have been hurt. If she had posted flyers around the academic buildings, or if she had taken out a full page ad in the college newspaper, it could be anticipated that the TA would find out. What she did was more public and more permanent than that. Why in the world did she think that the TA wouldn't find out?

Another student is quoted as saying,

I think that the group shouldn’t have affected a mature educator confident in her abilities.

I think that's simply foolish. I don't know anyone who could shrug off comments of this nature. And the students knew that the TA was not a "mature educator confident in her abilities." I think the student is just trying to excuse her behavior after the fact.

What really happened, in my opinion, is that the students somehow imagined they had a level of privacy that they didn't have. They thought this was the electronic equivalent of sitting around your dorm room bitching about your TA, but it isn't. It's far too public. And I think that it behooves us all to remember that our remarks are literally published world wide, and have a potential to reach people that we don't expect to reach.

Was the university correct to discipline the students? I can't say. I don't know what processes were followed, and what opportunities the students had to defend themselves. At the very least, I hope that these students have come to the realization that they need to think through their actions a little more carefully.