A trailer for a provocative Australian comedy about “race, Aboriginality, and discrimination” was banned from Facebook in mid-April because it contains very brief images of elderly Aboriginal women dancing topless in a traditional ceremony. You can view the trailer below. Rachel Clements, co-creator of the movie 8MMM, told the Sydney Morning Herald that she “was…
A 28-year veteran of the Greenburgh (NY) police department was suspended without pay and relieved of duty earlier this week for posting an apparently racist image to Facebook. Greenburgh Police Chief Christopher McNerney told The Journal News that last week, members of the police force showed him a copy of the image posted by Officer…
Samir Chopra, a professor in the Department of Philosophy, Graduate Center and Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, posed an interesting question on Facebook this morning: [fb_embed_post href=”https://www.facebook.com/samir.chopra.7737/posts/10100282856185893/” width=”550″ /] The consensus of the comments is that since arrest records are public, there is nothing that prevents police departments from posting them to…
If you’re in the area of Erie, Pennsylvania on May 15, think about spending the day at the “Moving Forward: Creating a Community Response to Cyberbullying” Conference at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College. The conference will be held from 9am to 4pm in the college’s Jack Burke Research and Economic Development Center. Registration begins…
The Boston Globe published a glowing article about Beacon Press, which is celebrating its 161st anniversary this year. The press, under the leadership of director Helene Atwan, recently moved from its historic offices behind the Massachusetts State House on Beacon Hill to a former factory at 24 Farnsworth Street near the city’s Fan Pier. I…
Sixteen months ago, David Byttow and Chris Bader created an app called “Secret” that was designed to permit users to anonymously share information with other users, friends, and contacts. The app and the concept of anonymous gossip proved popular: Secret gained as many as 15 million users in a fairly short time, and at the…
An arrest nearly two years ago of a man in New South Wales for allegedly using his cellphone to record so-called “upskirt” videos of women on a train platform wound up rocking the halls of one of Sydney’s oldest schools. After the arrest was made, police identified the suspect as Robert Emmett, a 36-year-old teacher…
Just in case anyone had any doubts, it turns out that 15-year-olds are pretty much the same around the globe. When students at the Primary School in Česká Lípa, a small city in the northern part of the Czech Republic, stumbled across a porn video featuring one of their teachers, it rapidly made the rounds of…
Thanks to the Iowa Board of Educational Examiners (@IowaBOEE) for their nice front-page review and recommendation of Cybertraps for Educators in their May newsletter. We truly enjoyed digging deeply into these issues [cyberloafing, privacy, First Amendment rights] (and many more), and we highly encourage other educators to consider this valuable resource. Cybertraps for Educators is…
Jeff Minh Ha, a 42-year-old teacher at the Columbia School in El Monte, California, was arrested on Friday, April 17, on charges of “exhibiting harmful matter in the presence of a minor.” The charge is a felony under California law. Ha is a 6th grade teacher at the El Monte school. He allegedly showed the…
