December 1, 2010

Honest question...

First off, watch this video...



Now, particularly in light of next week's lesson plans in our advisory bell - the topic is bullying, particularly cyberbullying...

Is this an example of cyberbullying?

Sure, it might be funny - or at least chucklesome - but the subject of the video clearly didn't intend for the video to be created nor did he - I assume - expect that video to be disseminated to the web.

I'm not an expert or anything - will be after next week, though - but I'm kind of thinking that this is cyberbullying and as much as it may be funny, it would be something that I, as a teacher, would be encouraged to stop.

Sorry, just wondering...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

A couple weeks ago, a friend and I had a conversation involving the right to post video without consent of people in the video. He was wondering why it hadn't come up in the Supreme Court. I said that some legislative body would have to create a law first and then someone would have to be charged for breaking that law that they then would appeal the law as unconstitutional and work its way up the court system, where the Supreme Court would mostly likely invoke the "freedom of speech" and that in modern times a person in a public place has a reasonable expectation to be recorded, whether it is embarassing or not. I guess some state's are grappling with cyberbullying, but it seems to currently be left to the school system to enforce.

Now, in the setting of school, teachers should have the right to stop such shenanigan, which probably in the case of this specific video, the teacher was probably out of the room. After the fact, can a teacher make a student take a video down from a website?

PHSChemGuy said...

I know that there have been a number of cases dealing with taking public photos/videos of people in public places. My understanding - admittedly from a very non-legal expert perspective - is that we're fair game when we're in public places.

But I agree that teachers should stop that kind of a thing from happening if we see it being done. I'm amazed at how quick students are to video tape anything and everything nowadays. I know students came in from lunch a couple of weeks ago - after there had been a fight in the lunch room - showing videos of the fight to friends who were in different lunch bells. And there are always kids begging me to let them film any demonstration that I do.

As to asking/forcing the students to take the video down from YouTube or wherever, that could be a lot tougher. I don't know that we have any authority over that - even if the video is taken at school.