On the last day of a visit to Bloomington, IN, my wife Dr. Amy Werbel and I had a very interesting lunch with Professor Bryant Paul, who teaches in the Department of Telecommunications at Indiana University – Bloomington. Professor Paul and I have widely overlapping interests, and I was pleased to hear that he has…
File this under “Cybertraps for Celebrities” [forthcoming]. During a debate over electoral reform in Brazil, Member of Parliament Joao Rodrigues was caught on video looking at a porn clip on his cell phone. While he did hide the cell phone under his desk, he didn’t seem particularly embarrassed by the video and even showed some…
I had the pleasure of speaking this morning to students at the Simmons College School of Library and Information Services at the invitation of Assistant Professor Laura Saunders, who is teaching a summer course entitled “Intellectual Freedom and Censorship.” In her syllabus, Dr. Saunders describes the class as follows: This course provides students with in-depth…
[Updated] A judge in the Auckland District Court will soon decide the fate of a New Zealand teacher accused of watching pornography on a school-issued computer and masturbating in an empty classroom. The report of the teacher’s alleged misbehavior came from a student who said that he had stopped by the classroom to discuss his…
From 1873 to his death in 1915, Anthony Comstock was one of the most powerful cultural arbiters in the United States. As Special Agent for the United States Postal Services and Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Comstock was charged with enforcing anti-obscenity and anti-indency laws for which he lobbied…
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…
2014-08-27 Cybertraps for Educators: The Professional Perils of 24/7 Communication from Frederick Lane This is a lecture I delivered to the faculty and staff of the Yakutat School District on August 27, 2015. If you are interested in discussing a presentation or professional development program for your organization on this topic, please contact me for…
