When Richard Ludlow was struggling in a linear algebra class at Yale, he scoured the internet for answers and stumbled upon a full video course available online from one of MIT’s mathematics professors, Gilbert Strang. He realized that there was an opportunity to create an easily accessible online platform for academic video courses and guest lectures, much like Hulu does for television content. As he did more research, he found that academic resources were grossly underutilized, as they were scattered across different sites and offered in varying file formats, making them difficult to find and browse.

So Ludlow launched Academic Earth with the goal of building a user-friendly platform for educational video that would let anyone be able to freely access instruction from the scholars and guest lecturers at the leading academic universities. The site offers 60 full courses and 2,395 total lectures (almost 1300 hours of video) from Yale, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, and Princeton that can be browsed by subject, university, or instructor through a user-friendly interface. Additionally, editors have compiled lectures from different speakers into Playlists such as “Understanding the Financial Crisis” and “First Day Of Freshman Year.” The site also features a roster of famous guest lecturers on entrepreneurship and technology including Larry Page, Carol Bartz, Tim Draper, Elon Musk, and Guy Kawasaki.

This isn’t a radically new idea. Fora.TV and BigThink both offer intellectual video content online. iTunes U hosts a lot of university content as well. Unlike Big Think, Academic Earth isn’t creating original content, it’s just repurposing existing academic content. And Fora.TV seems to focus more on speeches and public lectures. But Academic Earth has the right plan around providing free course lectures. You can watch an entire semester’s worth of lectures in a few days (if your brain can handle it). My one complaint is that for an academic site, it doesn’t seem to engage the user via forums, comments, social networking features, or ads. Ludlow says that all of these features and applications will be introduced slowly.

The interface of Academic Earth is simple and no frills but Ludlow plans to roll out additional features, such as a YouTube-like commenting system for videos. Users will be encouraged to ask questions about the content of videos, with the hope that other users (or scholars) will answer them. Ludlow says that the site will try to make money by advertising for educational goods and services such as tutoring and continuing professional education, and will share revenue with content providers. Ludlow says universities will have the choice of opting in to commercials and advertisements. In addition to the current university sources, the site will be adding content from think tanks, conferences, and government agencies. Also, lectures can be dry and boring to watch. Academic Earth lets you download the videos, but sometimes all you want is an MP3 with the audio so you can listen in the car or on a run.

by Alana Taylor, November 5, 2008

The idea for NYU Local, the newest addition to New York University’s list of publications, was born last year when founder and editor Cody Brown, 20, came up with the idea for a survey to be conducted by the Foundations of Journalism class. The survey question asked other NYU students: “Would you trade your right to vote for an iPod Touch?”

Founder and editor Cody Brown leads an NYU Local public meeting

The survey was then written up by fellow NYU student and journalist Lily Quateman who posted it online and watched it quickly gain widespread attention throughout the blogosphere.

“I came up with the survey, Lily wrote the story, and two hours later it was on the Drudge Report,” says Brown as we sit in what he calls “the second best seat” at Think Coffee.
Upon meeting him for the first time I notice his unkempt blonde hair, and piercing blue eyes.

We relate on many levels. We are both juniors at NYU, we love journalism, and we embrace new media. Even the insanity of being written about all over the Internet is something we can laugh about.

“It was absurd, the survey story blew up around Politico, Fox, and CNN,” he tells me. “The results were totally inconsequential, but the way that the news spread was really empowering.

Watching how fast the Internet moved was the inspiration for NYU Local, a blog magazine of sorts that mixes factual reporting, video, photos and opinion.

“I saw that it was a classic case of pack reporting, how easy it is to attach yourself,” Brown adds. “Sure, they would each format their stories differently, but they ultimately attacked the same angle.”

I could relate. The last time I wrote about new media and the journalism school at NYU, the reactions were loud and opinionated — some positive, some negative. And bloggers, just as professional journalists have done for years, kept pack reporting the same ideas over and over.

It certainly wasn’t the first time that I had experienced this sort of viral phenomenon either. Ever since I began blogging for Mashable I’ve noticed what I like to call “blog leeches.” These are the people and bots who subscribe to a certain online publication and then either automatically feed it out through their own sites to get free views from content that they did not create, or re-blog the content with a tiny bit of spin or summary.

A few months after the survey incident, NYU Local was launched with funding by the Reynold’s Program in Social Entrepreneurship and under the supervision of NYU journalism department head Brooke Kroeger and professor Adam Penenberg. Brown designed a WordPress platform for the site, hired writers and editors (including Quateman), and said goodbye to the world of print.

College Newspapers Are Dying Too

Just as I mentioned in my last Mediashift post, journalism schools need to teach new media because print is dying.

Lily Quateman

To be at the forefront of this change, NYU Local has latched onto the unique nature of this untraditional metropolitan campus and given it a beat, a new edginess that the older school paper, Washington Square News, has not been able to do.

“NYU Local was started to try to stop this pattern of disunity on campus,” explains Brown.

These days, not only do college students feel the need to report and receive their stories quicker, they’re tired of bored, bland writing. The attitude on the web versus on print is very different. Everyone knows that you can “get away” with more on the web. Most college newspapers have advisors and editors working over the writers’ shoulders, making sure they don’t write anything too brash that will upset the dean of the school. But on the web, writers are posting straight from laptops in their dorm rooms or from iPhones as they stroll down the street.

According to Brown, there is just no way that print can compete. He said the New York Times can no longer claim to contain “all the news that’s fit to print” with a straight face because that mantra isn’t true anymore. They are not as quick as the blogs in covering breaking news nor do they have constant news reports coming in from amateur journalists.

Trash the Term ‘Citizen Journalism’

“The idea of citizen journalism is a massive misnomer,” says Brown. “Everyone is a citizen and anyone can be a reporter. The term is patronizing.”

NYU Local hopes to let anyone and everyone contribute to the site and use it as a crowd-sourcing mechanism to allow naturally good and popular writers to rise to the top. The idea would be to remove the distinction of who is a professional and who is a citizen and let everyone contribute in the same way, using their real names and eventually building their own reputations.

NYU Local emphasizes the same motto that much of Web 2.0 and social media has been repeating for the last couple of years: a conversational approach. Brown hopes to open registration to everyone in the community and let them comment on the site, submit news tips, and even write their own articles.

This new-age platform is entirely inspired by “Rashomon,” the Japanese film by Akira Kurosawa about the deconstruction of the singular perspective. Not only does NYU Local not claim to be the final word on any story, but they encourage users to generate every angle they can.

Say Goodbye to Objectivity

“Most people who want to be objective tend to disguise their opinions,” Quateman says. As we speak over the phone, her voice sounds calm and collected. “Being objective treats readers like idiots and makes them guess.” That said, Quateman added that she didn’t want NYU Local to be completely one-sided. She noticed that the politics section was very liberal and had high hopes of finding “writers who like Sarah Palin.” But as for reporting in general, she thinks it should stop trying to be objective.

Quateman, who is just shy of her 20th birthday, actually dropped out of the journalism major when she discovered that NYU journalism students were required to double major. Instead, she transferred to the Gallatin School of Individualized Study and created her own major in journalism and new media.

In fact, of the three editors that I interviewed, none are journalism majors.

Ned Resnikoff, the editor of the “National” section, is a philosophy major who loves to write about politics. He joined NYU Local after being underwhelmed by the Washington Square News. He said the paper’s politics section was frustrating to read with its lecturing tone and frequent mishandling of the facts.

“The Washington Square News recently wrote that ‘this election would be easier if McCain and Obama announced who they wanted in their cabinets.’ And I’m like, yeah — except that it’s illegal,” Resnikoff explains.

He decided to join NYU Local because he felt that he needed a better medium for his “niche of pugnacious, political commentary.”

Since leaving WSN, Resnikoff has written various scathing attacks against their political writers, the latest being one in which he takes them to task for claiming that Gov. Sarah Palin represents the death of sexism in politics — and for using poor metaphors.

“Sarah Palin has taken us across the Rubicon, and there’s no going back,” wrote Ann Friedman in WSN.

Resnikoff replied with: “Because Palin’s … Caesar? And Rome is, what, sexism? And the Rubicon is a glass ceiling. Made out of water. Or something.”

Resnikoff, who is highly opinionated and wildly entertaining on NYU Local, began blogging about politics when he interned at Talking Points Memo.

Ned Resnikoff

“The greatest advantage [of blogging] is that we don’t come out once a week or even once a day,” he says. “We continually update all day.”

Resnikoff recalls walking by CNN headquarters and seeing news about John McCain’s “suspension” and quickly posting the story online five minutes later. “You just can’t do that in print,” he tells me.

Stealing the Spotlight From WSN

NYU Local, which launched just a mere two months ago, now averages thousands of unique views a month and is already beating Washington Square News in page views on Alexa. WSN is the school’s main campus paper that has been around for 36 years.

WSN has had a web edition of their paper for a few years now, but re-designed their look over the summer, which actually looks eerily similar to NYU Local’s template. But WSN Editor-in-Chief, Adam Playford, who has been working at the paper since he arrived at NYU, is not too focused on the web.

“For me personally, I don’t care how you read the Washington Square News, I just care that you read us,” says Playford. “I don’t care if you read online, pick up the paper, or pay someone to read us to you.”
Playford, who isn’t a journalism major either, but rather studying journalism at Gallatin, claims to read NYU Local frequently but not pay attention to their page views. He is not even sure whether the new site is a competitor.

“When [NYU Local] first launched, they launched as a campus newspaper online, but then when they relaunched they launched as a blog,” he says. “I really don’t know if their aim is to compete with us. But if that is their aim, then I think competition is healthy.” Playford says that for most newspapers, competition makes publications stronger, but he does not spend time thinking about NYU Local’s strategy nor has he looked at their numbers.

Although WSN and NYU Local may look similar online, the two publications function differently. Where NYU Local publishes spontaneously throughout the day, WSN posts one time at night.

According to Playford, this is a result of most of the staff spending their day in class. “It’s complicated to have a daytime web-first mentality because you want to make sure articles are done right, written engagingly, subtly edited,” he explains.

While Playford mentioned that his staff will post directly online if the content will lose value otherwise (as in the case of the election), he says that WSN will continue to be a print newspaper.

“Our business model would not particularly accommodate becoming an online-only paper,” he says. “The reason for that, which is very simple and true just about for any paper, is that our print edition is making more money than the online edition.”

Playford claims that for WSN to continue, it needs the revenue from the print edition to fuel fifty paid editorial staffers, another twenty paid business staffers, and various unpaid writers and photographers. This year the paper was able to fly a reporter to the Democratic National Convention. “We wouldn’t be able to fund that kind of operation if we were just online,” says Playford, adding that “this is not to say that we won’t be online-only some day.”

Another key difference between the two publications is that WSN does not take the “objectivity is null” approach. Playford clearly believes that the web allows for more multimedia, like video, but that WSN won’t change the way it reports in different mediums because they pride themselves in providing reporting that is objective, complete, and well-researched.

The Change Journalism Needs

NYU Local hopes to end objectivity and disunity and bring together people of all backgrounds, whether professional or amateur to report together and create new form of communication.

For the editors, this is still only the beginning.

They hope to create a conversational platform that allows everyone inside it to join, contribute, and influence what it calls news. Their goal is to leave WordPress and to invent a platform that makes breaking, sorting, and reviewing news as simple as using Facebook.

So what’s their challenge?

All three editors agree that it will be about identity, trying to find out who and what they are. They aren’t Gawker and they aren’t the New York Times. With a staff of 20 writers, they’re not a puny blog either.

The other challenging part of NYU Local won’t be coding the new platform, but instead creating a user interface that transforms the thousands of ways users could capture their beat into something simple, aesthetically pleasing, and in line with the publication’s values.

In Brown’s eyes, they are a news brand. What makes them innovative is that they cover their beat from a thousand different perspectives, elevate online discussion through accountability, and get the majority of their content for free. NYU Local wants to define the massive space in between both tiers of media (blogs and traditional newspapers), fusing the best parts of each.

As Brown puts it: “It’s time to start rejecting the tribe-like closed door behavior of most major media and imagine a news organization that evolves into a republic.”

Alana Taylor is a junior at New York University, double-majoring in journalism and history with a strong interest in film, entertainment, new media and technology. She currently manages her own blog, and works part-time for both Classic Media Inc. — a production company/distributor of family programming — and Mashable, the world’s most popular social networking blog.

by Alfred Hermida, October 27, 2008

Multimedia journalism is one of those terms often used to refer to a wide range of online content. Recently, I began a discussion with my students at the UBC Graduate School of Journalism to define exactly what the term means and how we can harness the many forms of online media to produce quality journalism.

We started by first asking what a multimedia story is not. After all, go to any news website and you are certain to see stories being told using a combination of media. But just because an online story has multimedia elements does not mean that it is a multimedia story.

By multimedia story, I mean a story that smoothly integrates video, text, still photos, audio and graphics. Usually, news websites fail to combine mediums in their stories, instead posting stand-alone text or video stories side by side. Often such stories are print or broadcast content that have been “repurposed” for the web. Repurposing is understandable, growing out of an economic need to make the most of the content by distributing it across several platforms.

But journalists need to understand that the Internet is not just another distribution channel. This is the starting point for multimedia journalism, defined by journalist and educator Jane Stevens as:

Some combination of text, still photographs, video clips, audio, graphics and interactivity presented on a website in a non-linear format in which the information in each medium is complementary, not redundant.

This means that journalists need to think on different levels as they conceive of a story and its treatment. It involves taking a multifaceted approach to a story and working out how best to tell it with the media available. The attraction for journalists is the ability to tell a story in multiple ways, making information accessible in ways that go beyond the standard news article in print.

Thinking Beyond Tools

Working in multimedia today is much easier than it was in the early days of online journalism 10 years ago, when journalists needed to have an intimate knowledge of HTML to use the web. Even textbooks produced just a few years ago devote chapters to HTML and CSS (cascading style sheets).

Today there are a plethora of tools to produce video, slideshows, maps and other multimedia works. Ten years ago, many of these features would have required programmers, but today they have become so simple that ordinary journalists can use them.

In the classroom, I’ve found that students are eager to tell their stories in text, photos, video and more. Sometimes, it is hard to rein in this enthusiasm. I try to remind them that our goal as journalists is not to give the audience everything.

One of the key roles of the journalist remains making editorial decisions on what is the most relevant and compelling information. What you leave out is an important as what you include. In one case, a student added stills from a presentation to explain a complex, technical issue. But without the commentary, the images were meaningless and confusing.

In any case, not all stories lend themselves to multimedia. Just because you can shoot video cheaply or produce an audio slideshow quickly, doesn’t mean you should. The best multimedia stories are multi-dimensional. They might include action that can be captured on video, or a process that can be illustrated with a graphic. Perhaps there is a strong emotional component that can be captured in a still photograph.

This requires that every journalist have some degree of multimedia literacy. At the very least, I expect my students to understand what kind of stories work best in what medium.

Making Practical Decisions

For this class, I shied away from just showing lots of examples of multimedia journalism, although I did point out the award-winning in-depth report on the Taliban by Canada’s national newspaper. Instead, we spent the time putting to practice these multimedia literacy skills.

For one exercise, we took a story idea from one student’s urban beat and broke it down into the different elements of the story. The idea focused on an art project in Vancouver that sought to educate children about the history of the city. We then discussed which medium was best suited to tell the different aspects of the story, using as our guide a cheat-sheet on multimedia story decisions developed by Mindy McAdams at the University of Florida.

Mindy McAdams

One student suggested a photo gallery with drawings by the children alongside archive images of the city. Another proposed putting together an audio slideshow with photos of the children and clips of them talking about the project. Another idea was a timeline of key moments in Vancouver’s history. There was no shortage of ideas, but in each case, students had to explain why they picked a particular choice of medium.

McAdams’ cheat-sheet is a practical first step for journalists in legacy media seeking to explore the online world. Print reporters tend to default to telling stories in text, while TV reporters will default to video. Yet the new digital media landscape means that journalists should think about what might really be the best format for a story.

Multimedia literacy is rarely discussed in newsrooms, but journalism students of today should learn it in preparation for entering the newsrooms of tomorrow.

If you have good examples of multimedia journalism, please share them in the comments below.

Alfred Hermida is an online news pioneer and journalism educator. He is an assistant professor at the Graduate School of Journalism, the University of British Columbia, where he leads the integrated journalism program. He was a founding news editor of the BBC News website. He blogs at Reportr.net.

Photo of Mindy McAdams by William Couch via Flickr.

By John Biggs
October 21st, 2008

Well here’s the first multi-touch, multi-user device for teaching early childhood skills. Like the surface, you can drag things around the surface and play word and picture games with multiple people just by dragging images around the screen.

The table launches on Thursday and will cost an actually amazingly inexpensive $7,000.

• What is the SMART Table? It has multitouch, multiuser capability, it has gesture recognition and it’s really customizable.
• What does the SMART Table do for learning? Students use their hands to complete interactive learning activities and games, encouraging collaboration. They develop skills in areas like reading, counting and visual spatial awareness.
• How much will it cost? Between US$7,000 – US$8,000.
• Why should you care? SMART shipped the first touch sensitive SMART Board interactive whiteboard in 1991. Around the world millions of teachers and students use SMART products on a daily basis and just recently we shipped our millionth SMART Board interactive whiteboard. Now the SMART Table is around the corner – the next big thing in learning technology.

SmartTech, the creator of the table system, is well-versed in gesture recognition thanks to their Smart Board whiteboard that scans images drawn on a whiteboard and prints them on demand. This isn’t a Surface product. Instead, it uses Smart’s DVIT (Digital Vision Touch) system to watch for fingers on the screen.

If high-school education is failing in the U.S., maybe Web video can help. Founded last April, Brightstorm is a Web video site that brings bright, talented teachers together with students who need some extra help. Backed by Korea’s KTB Ventures, which invested the entire $6 million in the startup’s A round, Brightstorm is launching today to the public.

There are about 20 teachers on the site offering video courses in subjects such as Geometry, the SAT, and A.P. U.S. History. Each course is broken up into episodes that are about 10 to 20 minutes each. Each course is $50, which is split between Brightstorm and the teachers. Students can watch a free promotional video to decide if they like the teacher and want to purchase the course. These tend to be overproduced with cheesy video graphics (stop with the jump cuts already), but they do the job of getting across each teacher’s personality and teaching style.

The videos are supplemented with interactive challenges, pop-up quizzes, and other bonus material. You can certainly see the appeal. If you were a high school student who needed a tutor, wouldn’t you rather watch videos on your computer for ten minutes a day than endure a live tutorial for an hour or more? Now, whether you are actually going to learn more is still debatable.

But there are plenty of startups trying. Here in the U.S., there is PrepMe, ePrep, Teach The People, and Grockit. In Asia, there is iKnow in Japan and perhaps the biggest success to date is Korea’s Megastudy. No wonder KTB took the whole round.

BrightStorm has launched a new online learning network for teenagers with video-based courses lead by experienced instructors. The concept is rather clever as they use the tools that teens use everyday such as online videos to deliver training and instructional materials in a very familiar format. This makes otherwise dull and tedious learning sessions more fun and enjoyable for the teen students which means they will be inclined to view more courses and take more classes.

The courses are presented in short entertaining ways with young attractive teachers (usually). This is another brilliant move because teens today have the attention span of a gibbon. This means that BrightStorm needs to present their material in a brisk and entertaining manner. They also infuse their videos with some levels of levity and humor which makes their material feel even less scholastic than they actually are.

Here are just some of the courses that teen can take: SAT Geometry | Algebra II | SAT Writing | SAT Math | AP U.S. History | AP U.S. Government | Writing | SAT Critical Reading | U.S. History.

The teachers are an integral part of the site, of course. Sure, some of them are young and highly photogenic, but don’t be fooled. There are plenty of good old-fashioned instructors on the site as well. While they understand that their videos have to be a little more hip and cool than what a traditional school would produce, they know they still need professional teachers that know how to teach whether it’s in a classroom or online via video.

BrightStorm has a Challenges section which allows teens to compete in fun contests every week and actually win prizes. It also allows them to see the work of their fellow online classmates and if nothing else lets them express themselves in these multimedia projects. For example, in one challenge called “Music to My Eyes”, they are asked to create a music based slide.com presentation.

In the shows area, there are many more viral like videos that also provide some level of information or educational material in an enjoyable format. For example, here’s “One Minute Hamlet” which shows a Shakespearean troupe rapping Hamlet in sixty seconds.

BrightStorm does a good job presenting course materials in a format that most teens will find pleasant and possibly enjoyable. More importantly, they can actually learn from these video courses which is obviously the primary goal of the service. One thing is certain, BrightStorm clearly demonstrates that educational videos can also be entertaining.

by Jeffrey D. Neuburger, October 15, 2008

It’s not just students who can get into difficulty for school-related blogging.

In a recent case, a federal court rejected a challenge brought by a non-tenured teacher when the public school at which he taught decided not to renew his contract. The school had accused the teacher of overly familiar contacts with students via his MySpace page that were deemed “disruptive to school activities.”

SPANIERMAN V. HUGHES

In Spanierman v. Hughes, 2008 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 69569 (D. Conn. Sept. 16, 2008), Jeffrey Spanierman, a teacher at Emmett O’Brien High School in Ansonia, Connecticut, created a MySpace page, ostensibly “to communicate with students about homework, to learn more about the students so he could relate to them better, and to conduct casual, non-school related discussions.”

One of Spanierman’s school colleagues became concerned about the page, which she said contained, among other things, pictures of naked men with “inappropriate comments” underneath them. She was also concerned about the nature of the personal conversations that the teacher was having with the students, and she convinced Spanierman to remove the page, which she considered “disruptive to students.” Spanierman subsequently created a new MySpace page, however, that included similar content and similar personal communications with students. When the colleague learned of the new page, she reported it to the school administration, which placed Spanierman on administrative leave and ultimately declined to renew his teaching contract for the following year. After hearings that he attended with his union representative and later with his attorneys, he received a letter stating that he had “exercised poor judgment as a teacher.”

LEGAL ISSUES

The discipline of a teacher for conduct outside the classroom raises a number of legal issues, depending upon the circumstances: Is the school public or private? Did the teacher have a contract with the school that gives the teacher rights with respect to job termination? Are there state statutes that impose standards on the teacher, or obligations on the school with respect to teacher discipline? Did the conduct involve expression that may be protected by the First Amendment? Did the conduct have a connection to the school environment?

Spanierman was employed by a public school, consequently, the school’s ability to take disciplinary action was limited by both the federal and state constitutions, in particular the First Amendment and the “due process” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Spanierman claimed that both his “procedural” and his “substantive” due process rights were violated.

As a non-tenured teacher, Spanierman was more vulnerable to the school’s evaluation of his conduct than a tenured teacher might have been.

The nature of the “procedure” to which an individual is entitled under the due process clause depends upon the nature of the right the individual is claiming. The minimum procedure to which an individual is usually entitled is notice and an opportunity to be heard. Spanierman based his procedural due process claim on the Connecticut Teacher Tenure Act, which he claimed gave him certain procedural rights, i.e., a period of notice and a hearing, and termination only for just cause. The court found that Spanierman had received notice and a hearing, but that neither the Connecticut Statute nor the teacher’s union-negotiated agreement required a showing of just cause for a decision not to renew a non-tenured teacher’s contract.

A claim of substantive due process focuses on the nature of the action taken by government rather than the procedure by which it is undertaken, i.e., whether the governmental action is arbitrary or without justification. The court also rejected Spanierman’s substantive due process claim that the public school’s action was arbitrary, egregious and outrageous, again relying on Spanierman’s non-tenured status, and the fact that non-renewal of a non-tenured teacher’s contract was the type of event specifically anticipated in the union-negotiated employment agreement.

SELECTIVE PROSECUTION?

Apparently, Spanierman was not the only teacher in the school with a MySpace page. Accordingly, he made a “selective prosecution” argument, pointing to two other teachers at his school who also had MySpace pages but who had not been disciplined. Spanierman argued that he had been treated differently than his colleagues in violation of the U.S.Constitution’s Equal Protection clause. The court dismissed that claim on purely legal and on factual grounds, i.e., that Spanierman failed to show that the other teachers had contact with students via their MySpace pages. Consequently, the court concluded, the situations of the other teachers were not analogous to Spanierman’s (they were not “similarly situated”) and therefore he had not been treated differently in comparison to them.

Spanierman’s free speech claim was rejected as well. Although the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that both students and teachers retain free speech rights in the school environment, those rights are not unrestricted. See, for example, Morse v. Frederick, 127 S. Ct. 2618 (2007), the “Bong Hits for Jesus” case, where the U.S. Supreme Court famously upheld the discipline of a student for unfurling a banner containing a pro-drug message at a school-sponsored event, on the grounds that the banner violated a school policy against the display of material advertising or promoting the use of illegal drugs.

DISRUPTIVE TO SCHOOL ACTIVITIES

The school district judged that Spanierman’s behavior on his MySpace page was “likely to disrupt school activities.” It is on this point that the court drilled down to Spanierman’s contacts with his students. Excerpts of a number of exchanges with students were included in the opinion. And while to some these exchanges may seem innocuous, the court concluded as follows:

In the court’s view, it was not unreasonable for the Defendants to find that the Plaintiff’s conduct on MySpace was disruptive to school activities. The above examples of the online exchanges the Plaintiff had with students show a potentially unprofessional rapport with students, and the court can see how a school’s administration would disapprove of, and find disruptive, a teacher’s discussion with a student about “getting any” (presumably sex), or a threat made to a student (albeit a facetious one) about detention.

Moreover, there is evidence of complaints about the Plaintiff’s MySpace activities. For example, in her affidavit, Ford states that Emmett O’Brien students informed her of the Plaintiff’s MySpace conduct, which made some of them “uncomfortable.”…It is reasonable for the Defendants to expect the Plaintiff, a teacher with supervisory authority over students, to maintain a professional, respectful association with those students. This does not mean that the Plaintiff could not be friendly or humorous; however, upon review of the record, it appears that the Plaintiff would communicate with students as if he were their peer, not their teacher. Such conduct could very well disrupt the learning atmosphere of a school, which sufficiently outweighs the value of Plaintiff’s MySpace speech.

NOTHING NEW?

It’s possible to view the Spanierman case as a cautionary tale on using new forms of communication in the educational environment. Spanierman said he intended to use his MySpace page to better relate to his students; indeed the case demonstrates that such a page can facilitate easy communication between teachers and students. But it is that easy familiarity that, in the view of the school district, drew Spanierman over the line between acceptable discourse and inappropriate communications. The severity of the punishment may also reflect an institutional discomfort with a new means of student-teacher communication that is outside the channels customarily controlled by the school district.

And, of course, the Spanierman case could also be viewed as a simple case of inappropriate communications with students, regardless of the medium involved. Although reasonable minds may differ on whether Spanierman’s communications warranted the discipline he received, the court ruled that, under the circumstances, it was the school district’s call to make.

IT’S NOT THE FIRST, AND IT WON’T BE THE LAST

This is not the first case in which a teacher, or an aspiring teacher, was discharged or disciplined for conduct involving a MySpace page. In another recent case, the so-called “drunken pirate” case, a teacher in training was denied a teaching degree just prior to her graduation when officials at her teaching school found a photo on her MySpace page showing her in a pirate hat, drinking alcohol. In Snyder v. Millersville University, filed in federal court in Pennsylvania (the case documents are available here), there was apparently no contact with students, and it is disputed whether any students at the school ever saw the photo or the MySpace page. The school district contends that Snyder’s conduct as a student teacher was unprofessional in ways unrelated to her MySpace page.

The Snyder case is also complicated by the question of whether the aspiring teacher should be treated under the legal standards applicable to student conduct or the standard applicable to teacher conduct. Snyder v. Millersville appears to be heading for trial. It will be interesting to see if the result in the case differs from that in Spanierman.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Both the Spanierman and Snyder cases are a subset of a larger category of disputes that involve posting in online forums, blogs and social networking sites. Regardless of the rights implicated, these cases remind us to be mindful of the ramifications that may flow from online personal expression that is readily accessible to students, co-workers, and employers.

Jeffrey D. Neuburger is a partner in the New York office of Proskauer Rose LLP, and co-chair of the Technology, Media and Communications Practice Group. His practice focuses on technology and media-related business transactions and counseling of clients in the utilization of new media. He is an adjunct professor at Fordham University School of Law teaching E-Commerce Law and the co-author of two books, “Doing Business on the Internet” and “Emerging Technologies and the Law.” He also co-writes the New Media & Technology Law Blog.

By John Timmer | Published: October 13, 2008 – 01:19PM CT

October 1, 2008 – 9:30 pm PDT – by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins

The buzz has more or less died down, at least in the pages ofGawker, MediaShift, TechDirt and Romenesko. But our very ownAlana Taylor did a feature for PBS blog MediaShift, a commentary really, on the lack of New Media savvy amongst the students and faculty at NYU in a class called “Reporting Gen Y.”