REDOX: Facebook

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4 jun 2011

When Teachers Talk Out of School

Today, teachers can be suspended, and even fired, for what they write on Facebook.

Just ask Christine Rubino, the New York City math teacher who may soon be dismissed for posting angry messages about her students. Last June, just before summer vacation began, a Harlem schoolgirl drowned during a field trip to a beach. Ms. Rubino had nothing to do with that incident, but the following afternoon, she typed a quick note on Facebook about a particularly rowdy group of Brooklyn fifth graders in her charge.

“After today, I’m thinking the beach is a good trip for my class,” she wrote. “I hate their guts.”

One of Ms. Rubino’s Facebook friends then asked, “Wouldn’t you throw a life jacket to little Kwami?”

“No, I wouldn’t for a million dollars,” Ms. Rubino replied. She was pulled from the classroom in February and faced termination hearings; the case is now with an arbitrator.

(...)
Outside school, meanwhile, teachers must also avoid public language that mocks, demeans or disparages the children they instruct. Cruel blog posts about lazy or disobedient students echo the snarky smackdown culture of cable TV talk shows. And they’re anathema to a truly democratic dialogue.

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of education and history at New York University, is the author of “Small Wonder: The Little Red Schoolhouse in History and Memory.”

15 dic 2010

Mark Zuckerberg & Facebook

Person of the Year 2010

For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME's 2010 Person of the Year.

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It's a fair question. Almost seven years ago, in February 2004, when Zuckerberg was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard, he started a Web service from his dorm. It was called Thefacebook.com, and it was billed as "an online directory that connects people through social networks at colleges." This year, Facebook — now minus the the — added its 550 millionth member. One out of every dozen people on the planet has a Facebook account. They speak 75 languages and collectively lavish more than 700 billion minutes on Facebook every month. Last month the site accounted for 1 out of 4 American page views. Its membership is currently growing at a rate of about 700,000 people a day.

Working at Facebook: A Day with the Profile Team