Slashdot Mirror
Australian Teachers Try To Shut Down Website
DeathElk writes "New South Wales teachers are attempting to have a website based in the United States closed down due to "defamatory" content. The site in question encourages students to rate teachers at their school, which obviously results in some colorful content. Now the story has hit the media, with some insightful quotes such as "The president of the NSW Secondary Principals Council, Jim McAlpine, said the Federal Government should block access to 'scurrilous American websites'."
I was just listening to Radio National (oz public radio station) do a story on this. One of the people interviewed said that China is capable of blocking websites from overseas so maybe something similar should start up in Australia. I find it kind of disturbing that people believe that the great firewall is a rational response to the potential slander of some teachers.
every time you try to censor something in today's tech world you end up attracting more attention than if you had left it alone. besides, how can they possibly enforce this? they cant block the site at home or any cyber cafe or anywhere but the school's computers.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Gulp... Hope they don't ban slashdot too ;-(
The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed (SK)
most Austrailians I've met in person have been pretty cool people, but there seems to be a large portion of their online population who are big on censorship. At one point I was a very active member on a Stargate message board, but ther was an Aussie admin who was constantly closing threads as "Asked and answered" "No longer relavent" and the best yet "Off Topic" the funny part about the off topic one was that it was in a section of the board specifically labeled as the Off Topic section. I got the board admin in on it (he wasn't usually watching what was going on) and got their over zealous modding slowed down, but I stood my ground. I wasn't going to post anymore unless they reopend some wrongly closed threads, they didn't.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
As a side note, it's also interesting that the first two posts in response to this story seemed to advocate the censorship instead of considering whether the "defamed" teachers might in fact be unfit. Are Aussies really that OK with censorship?
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
Who the hell modded that insightful?
How about (-1) flamebait instead?
Optimist: The thumb drive is half empty! Pessimist: The thumb drive is half full...
We'll just post the defamatory content in hexadecimal poems and songs on You Tube!
Teaching is one of very few services whose practitioners are hard to gage until it's too late.
Now you know who sucks, and therefore who to avoid.
I'm sure the ones that suck are really ticked about this.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Where was this site when I was at school. I would have loved to issue a report card on some of my teachers.
The quotes about the anonymous principal, in the article? Yeah, I went to that school, she was principal back then, and the comments are 100% spot on. Funny that she'd find her way into the SMH and onto Slashdot ...
I'm an Aussie myself and I'm entirely not surprised. A lot of Australians are well-meaning but conservative, especially the older ones in office - their kneejerk reaction to a situation is to try to make it go away, rather than address the underlying issues.
It is my hope that websites like this will encourage quality teaching and improvement in teacher training/practice, but a lot of people think it's better to brush it under the carpet rather than do the hard yards to satisfy the students.
That said, there's no excuse for spreading falsehoods about teachers who don't deserve it. I really don't rate students to give fairly assess the short-comings of someone who just assigned them homework.
... what a fucking joke. Look, I can understand that the teachers feel they are being defamed - they certainly are - but some of the quotes illustrate why this is just an emotional reaction:
(From TFA) "It is clearly an absolute disgrace that people are anonymously able to make comments about teachers that are quite atrocious," she said.
So what? Why should someone's anonymous statement on some website mean anything to these teachers? Can't they just ignore it?
The quote from Jim McAlpine at the end of the article is an absolute disgrace and shows that he is completely out of touch with internet governance, or lack-thereof.
I'm sure Slashdotters will make plenty of disparaging comments towards Australians but this comes down to an irrational, emotional reaction by a small bunch of luddite fuckwits who should know better.
I wash mah-self with a rag on a stick.
As with many stories, there is more to this than meets the eye.
The NSW Teachers Federation, which is a fairly powerful union here, has been vigorously fighting any attempts to rate the teachers performance and that of their students. Report cards for students are virtually meaningless nowdays and they have fought tooth and nail to prevent the return of the old system. I can't see what justification the Dept of Education has for blocking access to these sites, but as someone who went through the NSW system, I think having a rating site is a great idea. Many of the teachers are less than competent to be teaching our children.
Don't tailgate - the end is near!
In some ways, this isn't that different than students talking behind the teachers backs. At least this way the teachers can find out what the students are saying about them.
Guessing you've never actually lived here...
Australia has thousands of stupid laws that the majority don't agree with, we have an effective way of dealing with these, ignore them.
Having worked (briefly) in the Victorian education system as an IT support lackey, I can definitely say that teachers here have security issues and closet inferiority complexes.
Some of the general reasons that lead to this include, but are not limited to:
* The advancing average age of secondary teachers
* The general lack of tech savvy amoungst teachers and supporting staff
* The ultra-low wages, high-volume classrooms.
* The mentality from the general public that the teachers are given an 'easy go' and should be teaching their kids how to read/write (nevermind that this should have been done BEFORE the student reaches primary school, let alone secondary school, IMHO)
Case in point. One time, I was in a secondary college, and a group of teachers were discussing general causes of problem students. I casually remarked "You have to admit, sometimes it's not the student that is the direct cause". I didn't get a chance to elaborate, all three teachers immediately assumed I'd accused THEM of being incompetent (when i was going to discuss an event from high school where a teacher had shown up drunk for work)
Teachers tend to be very protective of their egos, so the incident in this slashdot story doesn't surprise me in the slightest (and, I'll also suggest it's being overblown here, it's no-where near what some US schools have done, such as suspending/expelling students, etc, over similar incidents)
Many people favour free speech. Fewer support it when people say things they don't like.
It happens on slashdot too - look how people abuse the moderation system to supress opinions with which they disagree..
Your constitution was a remarkable document, granted, but its role as the absolute guarantor of everything under the sun is exaggerated. It didn't protect you from McCarthyism, it didn't protect you (and the rest of the world) from Gitmo, it didn't stop Lenny Bruce from being arrested repeatedly, it didn't stop Lady Chatterley's Lover from remaining unpublished in the United States for decades, and so on. In practice, all it means much of the time is that when community attitudes finally change, it's more often judges rather than politicians who give effect to the change.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
> I wonder if truth is a defense against slander/libel/defamation in Australia. It isn't in England
Yes it is, just that the burden of proof is on the defendent, not the plaintiff. Read the article in Wikipedia.
The Muse of Irony demands it!
Soylent Green is peoplicious!
the teachers involved should sue the websites to get the identities and then sue the posters...
oh wait... that costs money and takes time...
what else could we do... Ah I know... get our union to get the government to block them instead...
la la la la la la... I see no problem.... la la la la la....
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
my fear is that with the current state of play* the China thing could very well happen.
*one-party state posing as a two-party state with talkback radio providing the entire political agenda. Australia has a very small media market with 95% of the populace being led along by 2 or 3 media moguls.
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
To get an idea of the kind of deliberate ignorance he's talking about, it wasn't until last year that we finally got around to legalising things like recording a show from the tv watch later. This is despite vhs machines being sold here for ~15 years!
Sure, technology has far outstripped the rate of change of the law, but here it's not till some smart-arse tries to use an outdated law that anyone does anything about it.
IIRC there was an outdated law to close the Harbour Bridge once a year to drove sheep across it which was only revoked recently, and only because someone tried to invoke it.
"If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?" - Albert Einstein
A teacher who starts at 8:30am and knocks off at 3:30pm isn't doing the job. There's time spent preparing lessons, quizzes, tests, etc.; then there's the time spent correcting the aforesaid. There are parent-teacher meetings that normally happen outside of school hours, continuing education requirements (many of which require using up some of that "12 weeks annual leave", or night classes or whatever), and supervising extra-curricular activities (athletic coaches usually get paid extra, but it isn't that much, and non-athletic activities usually don't entail extra pay).
Being a teacher entails acting as a mentor, an arbitrator, a cop, a counsellor, a confidante, a social worker, and many other professions. And then they have to put up with bozos who complain that they are overpaid.
I'm not actually a fan of the public school system; I think it's designed primarily to create sheep who will be docile and obedient workers for industry (for further discussion of that, see the works of John Taylor Gatto and John Holt). My wife and I homeschooled our own children, because we could see that public school wasn't serving their needs or helping them achieve their potential. But to assert that teachers have it easy and don't deserve what they make is utterly ridiculous. It is a demanding, high-stress, low-respect job, and anyone who does it (and doesn't just go through the motions) deserves more respect and salary than they probably get.
As for making $10,000 more than you, without knowing what that is or what you do to earn it, that's a meaningless comparison.
-Mike
I'm sorry; I don't know what I was thinking!
dicks, sometimes.
I heard a teacher from the Uk talking about the UK version of the site, calling for the government to regulate it or shut it down.
His argument was that, he had a series of ten comments about him, eight of which were glowing - utterly positive - but because the other two were a little negative - and not abusive or defamatory, mind - the whole thing was an outrage, and Something Should Be Done(TM).
This guy wasn't just any old teacher either, he was the head of some teacher's union, speaking in an official capacity.
Maybe it's the result of having a constant work environment where the principle relationship with people is one of authority and, perhaps, a lack of firm grounding in that authority, that results in such hypersensitivity to criticism. Whatever the reason, they should get a bleedin' grip.
Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility. - Ambrose Bierce
(If it were technically possible,) how would you react to a website where anyone (including potential employers) could search for you and see what your average bug count per 100 lines of code was?
Believing something doesn't make it true. Not believing something doesn't make it false.
I'm a teacher in New Zealand and many of the schools here in NZ are listed on this site. I think this site is actually beneficial. Most on the comments on there are positive and constructive. Some are not. I think the moderators do a reasonable job removing imature slander etc. Anyway I think it's cool but then i would say that because my feedback so far has been sweet! If i had negative feedback on there then it might give me a hint that i might need to change my teaching practice.
I think the key problem is to find a way to enable the debate without letting defamation creep in. I disagree /entirely/ with trying to shut the site down because that is blunt censorship, but there has to be accountability.
How to impose that without violating the right to privacy is another matter, but it's not right that you go and call someone names without being responsible for your words - what's to stop someone maliciously claiming one of those teachers does strange things with furry animals (I'm keeping this light, I'm sure you can come up with worse)?
So, I think the site idea is good, even though teachers may not like it, but it needs moderation, right of reply and accountability without voiding the anonymous nature (as that would otherwise stop the debate for want of damage to grades and/or expulsion).
Bottomline, however, is that there appears to be quite a disconnect between teachers/management and the students. It would be wise for the teachers to start thinking about that and maybe find a solution for debate closer to home. This is what leadership (and teaching) is supposed to be about..
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