Butterfly's Nightmare

A few of these blogging/education/privacy threads seemed to get intertwined on the weekend. Butterfly Gemini talks about her personal nightmare when she discovered that a student had made threatening comments in her LiveJournal:

"So on a whim one evening, I searched for the city in which those students resided. It was not that difficult to ascertain to whom a number of the journals belonged, despite their entire full name not appearing on their Info pages. Oftentimes, though, they would do some survey and write in their full name. The biggest surprise and scare though was the one entry which glared at me when I scrolled down to read the life-threatening comment with my name clearly mentioned."

Her institution's response was disappointing, but telling. They seemed to imply that it was the teacher's fault, asking whether she had sent the student to that site or assigned the journal-writing. Two things become clear when reading this post: students will use the web to write whatever they want about their school, teachers, and fellow students...and most schools will be so fixated on the potential dangers that they won't be able to harness that same power for learning.