http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/02/12/school-facebook.html
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070213.FACEBOOK13/TPStory/TPNational/Ontario/
This is juts 30km north of me…
Long story short – students get upset at ban of cells/pagers/other devices in school and blame principal of school (school board policy BTW).
Kids go onto social networking site and make comments, turning into something pretty nasty (some of the comments suggest he should suck some part of the male anatomy). Kids get suspended, though their punishment is less than if they had said the same things about a fellow student(board cyberbullying policy).
The kids have been all over the news saying this isn’t fair, that they have the right to free speech and since it wasn’t posted from school grounds the school has no right to interfere.
To me this is the classic free speech/responsibility challenge. The students are wrong to think that something that they do outside of school, but that affects the atmosphere of the school, cannot be held against them. If I slander my employer from my home, they can fire me. The students somehow think that they have the right to say whatever they want without consequences.
Now some students may have been caught in a wide net because the school board doesn’t understand the technology. The student council president was a member of the group(he was invited by others) but did not post anything at all, and was suspended with the rest.
Frankly I think these kids are the enemies of free speech and fair comment. If they had used the forum to debate the fairness of the cell phone ban, I’d be all for it(though I agree with the ban, I like open debate). But their personal abusive attacks cannot be let pass.
James