in General, Tech

Big Blog Brother

Cnet talks about high schools and universities using students’ blog contents against them.

Everything old is new again, eh?

I was a Junior in high school during Columbine (1999) and the aftermath thereof. The security crackdown was borderline obscene. One of my friends was nearly suspended for some fairly innocuous comments on his web page.

I’m sure the term ‘blog’ wasn’t in the popular lexicon yet back then, but the only real difference here is scale. I’ve heard current high school students describe their administration’s efforts to sneakily obtain invites to students’ social networking sites, with the sole objective of monitoring what is going on.

During my turn in the cycle, administrative types eventually got bored with the idea when there simply weren’t enough students’ web pages to warrant monitoring. Now that everyone and their goldfish has a blog, the supposed “threat” posed by kids fooling around is going to be massive and harder to ignore.

Now more than ever, students need to be educated about managing their online presence.