Grammatista

The article that I read came out of the Northwest Arkansas News Source and it was called “School bullies move online; rules tricky to write, enforce.” As one could guess from the title it is another testament to how social networking sites like Myspace and Facebook are going to wreck the world. Over the past few months that I have been researching this topic I have noticed more and more of these kinds of articles. However, unlike other articles that I have read, this article depicts how a state legislature has decided to not just be another group of anti-Myspacers, but really set in place some rules and guidelines that will actually help students in regards to internet safety.

Cyberbullying was the heart of the Arkansas legislative issue, with a particular incident being the focal point for most of the debate. Billy Wolfe, a junior high school student in Fayetteville, AR, was a victim of cyberbullying,”

“Wolfe sued several classmates, claiming that they had injured him after soliciting classmates to physically harm him. They did it on Facebook, an online social-networking site popular among high school and college students… Wolf’s March 6 filing in Washington County Circuit Court accuses a group of students of physically assaulting him in March 2007 as he tried to leave on of his classes at Woodland Junior High School.”

This article goes on to explain how Penney Wolfe, Billy’s mother, had spoken to the principal of the school on numerous occasions trying to stop the violence before it happened and she received little to no help. In my opinion, even though Facebook is where the problem started, this eventual incident could have easily been taken care of by the administration at the school and to solely blame an internet site for a student getting assaulted at school is silly; the responsibility of blame goes much further than that.

That point being said later in the article a statistic was given that the Arkansas legislature used when deciding whether or not to implement tighter internet safety policies: “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta estimates that 34 percent of students have been the victim of cyberbullying, 21 percent of students have perpetrated online harassment, and 68 percent of those harassed online also experience off-line aggression.”

With statistics like this it makes my task, which is promoting the use of social networking sites in schools, tougher by the second. But what I think is an overlooked idea in this article as well as in our society is that, like all new technologies there are going to be many setbacks. Nonetheless schools, teachers, and students need to work positively to ensure that all of this new technology can be incorporated; because the gains will definitely outweigh the work.

School Bullies Move Online

by Northwest Arkansas News Source

6 April, 2008

Full Article