YouTube Stays Relevant Despite Pulled Content

Gray writes "École Secondaire Mont-Bleu has banned all personal electronic devices and suspended two 13-year-old girls after one uploaded to YouTube a camera phone video of their teacher yelling at the other. After the video was posted on the popular internet video site, the teacher was so embarrassed that he stayed home from work, where he remains on stress leave. The teachers' union is now trying to get all personal electronic devices banned from all schools in Western Quebec." Meanwhile, via the PVRBlog comes word that YouTube has helped raise CBS' ratings by some 7-9%. From that article: "CBS has uploaded more than 300 clips that have a total of 29.2 million views on YouTube, averaging 857,000 views per day, since the service launched on October 18. CBS has three of the top 25 most viewed videos this month (Nov.1-17), including clips from CBS's Tuesday night hit drama 'NCIS,' 'Late Show with David Letterman,' 'The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson' and 'The Early Show.' The CBS Brand Channel is also one of the most subscribed channels of all time with more than 20,000 users subscribing to CBS programming on YouTube since the channel launch last month."

Comments

Two different things

[NightWulf]

One is the fact that kids were recording what was going on privately, i.e. these two teachers fighting. Sure one can argue it was done in public, but still. This is a new world, where even the average joe can feel like a famous actor, where any little flub or stupid act they do can be recoreded by 500 people with camera phones, and uploaded to millions of viewers in a few minutes. It used to be you needed to be someone important to be embarassed by millions, now you just need to be in the unfortunate position of being around a cell phone.

As for CBS, good for them. I would rather have an entire episode of a show, with commercials on youtube in a good resolution then to have to watch it on TV, or be forced to record it via dvr, etc.

Objective Viewfinders

[airos4]

And how many times did you ever go home and tell a parent about how a teacher treated you, and get ignored or dismissed with "They wouldn't do that."

Personally? As much as I'm against the Big Brother society, I'm amused that someone is so scared of how he could be portrayed by an objective viewfinder. And he'll tell us all about how the context isn't there, but there's no good reason why a teacher should be yelling and carrying on to the point where it looks good on video. There's other more effective ways to reach people, and if you can't figure one of them out then there are other career paths.

Re:Objective Viewfinders

[El Cubano]

And how many times did you ever go home and tell a parent about how a teacher treated you, and get ignored or dismissed with "They wouldn't do that."

And how many times have schools contacted parents or called them to a parent teacher conference to tell of some misbehavior by their child, only to have the parents say "that's not possible, my little angel would never do that and if you try and discipline him/her for it, we'll sue"? Now, if the teacher tried to record the little monsters (even for the teacher's own protection and to have proof of the act), the parents would be completely livid. Lawsuits would be flying and we would all be screaming about "The Man" trying to oppress the students.

I too am against a Big Brother society, but I think we are already getting there. The problem is that Big Brother is not the government, but rather any knucklehead with some sort of recording device. Personally, I think those kids should be treated the same way a teacher at that school would have been for similarly recording an altercation instigated by a student toward a teacher.

I absolutely despise teachers' unions. I think that they have done more to damage the quality of education in the industrialized world than any other force. However, it is abundantly clear that this teacher needs the full backing of the union. More than anything, kids today need to learn respect for authority. This doesn't mean that authority is always right or infallible, just that kids should be taught to respect and that there are proper channels in which to handle grievances (i.e., posting to youtube is not the proper channel).

Re:Objective Viewfinders

[dircha]

Wake up, buddy. These are public employees. These are the people to who we have committed one of the most fundamental and important roles in our society: teaching the next generation. In many cases these teachers are more important in shaping the future of our society than are parents themselves.

You better believe we need to hold these people to the highest level of accountability.

And you know what? Teachers unions should be happy we are doing this. As we weed out the scum and the freeloaders who are negatively impacting our children, we will raise the standards in the teaching profession and hopefully thereby raise the wages of teachers to reflect the fundamental and critical role they play in our society and our future.

Misleading Summary

[TubeSteak]

FTFA: the incident took place a month ago, when one student provoked the teacher into yelling at her while a classmate secretly taped the confrontation.

As Admiral Akbar once said: It's a trap. TFA also mentions that the exact same thing happened at another school in Canada.

We all know how easily video can be creatively edited & pictures can be photoshopped... so short of banning camera phones & (video) cameras, I don't really see how you resolve the issue.

Flamebait?

[Travoltus]

When a teacher loses control, there's no excuse.

Pranks like this get caught and lead to kids being punished, but whenever a teacher loses control, that damages their credibility and that of the school's. In this case, both the teacher and students need to be suspended; and they all need counseling. The kids need to be taught not to play pranks and the teacher needs to learn how to maintain control.

We need those student cameras in place in case teachers start shit with the students (i.e., beatings, molestation, etc).

Banning student cameras in this case is like banning cars because someone went on a rampage across a playground.

Re:Hahaha.

[etymxris]

I don't know, there seems to be a moral difference between mocking children who have no choice but to be where they are, and mocking adults who chose the profession they are in. Teachers are held to a much higher standard of conduct than students, and for good reason.

Re:New trend

[Telvin_3d]

I was with you right up to that last part.

And until Adobe stops dragging their feet on Linux (and even BSD) support, fuck Flash, too. Let's face it, the browser plugin situation is a disaster

Using Linux is your choice. YOURS. You have made the choice to use an OS that has roughly 3% market share. Not only that, but an OS where interoperability between distros is far from assured. Oddly enough, the fact that Adobe supports 95% of the market sounds like more than enough for me. The browser plug-in situation is great! Flash is compatible on more types of computers than 99% of the programs out there. Flash is more cross-browser and cross-platform compatible than many HTML/CSS websites. If you have chosen to use an OS that is not supported by a piece of software that has become a major part of the web, that is your choice. The rest of the world is under no obligation to support a platform just because you happen to use it.