Jeff Jarvis e-mailed me this link to a Wall Street Journal article on blog banning.
As parents wring their hands about Internet predators, many teens are worried about a different kind of online intruder: the school principal.
Students are blogging about schoolyard crushes and feuds, posting gossip about classmates on social-networking sites like MySpace.com and Facebook.com, and sharing their party snapshots on public Web pages. Increasingly, their readers include school administrators, who are doling out punishments for online writings that they say cross the line.
Pretty interesting stuff. So maybe we should have every student, teacher and administrator read this guide to student blogging from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
The Bloggers’ FAQ on Student Blogging addresses legal issues arising from student blogging. It focuses on blogging by high school (and middle school) students, but also contains information for college students.
Bottom line, however, is that case law just hasn’t been blogified yet. In light of the current discussions, this part is pretty relevant:
Is My School-Hosted Blog a Public Forum?
A public forum is one where the student bloggers, not school administrators, have the authority to determine the content. Whether a school-hosted blog would be considered a public forum, and therefore not subject to Hazelwoodcensorship, is determined on a case-by-case basis, looking at the school’s policies and statements. If your school has an Internet Policy or Terms of Use for its site-hosting services, look it over carefully to see if the school has a right to edit or censor content.
And, of course, the ultra bottom line is that we need to get EVERYONE up to speed on this stuff as quickly as possible.
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