Every year, it happens in mid-spring. Schools across the country feel the excitement and fervor of March Madness. As sports fans are experiencing the frills and thrills of watching their team march through NCAA tournament rounds, students, parents, teachers, and administrators in local school districts across the nation face a different sense of fervor—standardized tests. In the sports world, Cinderella storylines exist when a team performs above expectation. In the K–12 assessment world, no such opportunity exists. Perhaps educators and policy makers should look away from their respective brackets and consider how to reward their local schools and teachers, who experience their own uncelebrated Cinderella stories each year.
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Educational reform movements are emphasizing that teacher professional learning is a key component of change and an important link between standards and improved student learning. As students are expected to learn more complex material and new analytical skills in preparation for further education and work in the age of information and globalization, teachers must learn to teach in ways that encourage higher level thinking and performance. A new kind of teaching is needed, conducted by teachers who understand learning and as well as teaching, who can address students’ needs and the demands of their disciplines, and who can create bridges between students’ experiences and curriculum goals. This commentary discusses the gap between current professional development practices in American schools and research-based best practices of teacher professional learning and identifies changes that must be made to transform professional learning opportunities in our schools.
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In this article, the author explores the implications of the trend toward linking early childhood education more closely to schooling. He uses the example of “prek-3rd” to point out both positive and problematic aspects of this trend.
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Although Latinas’ relatively low rate of college-going has sometimes been explained by the influence of traditional gender roles, this article argues that sometimes it might instead represent emergent feminism and a means of contesting and remaking those roles. Based on a 5-year case study of one academically gifted Mexican American immigrant youth who decided to go to work instead of college, the article considers implications for Latina college recruitment.
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This article examines how the effects of institutions on teaching practices can be mediated by social networks within schools. The study focuses on teachers’ responses to policies developed from the National Reading Panel’s recommendations for teaching reading.
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Examination of the political origins of state performance funding for higher education in six states (Florida, Illinois, Missouri, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Washington) and the lack of its development in another two states (California and Nevada).
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This article examines the effects of individual- and institutional-level factors across secondary and postsecondary contexts on students’ likelihood of majoring in the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in college.
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This article highlights the contradictions that preservice teachers encounter when attempting to reconcile their own perspectives about academic achievement that emphasize growth and progress with those found in larger policy and school contexts that focus on success and mastery of common learning standards. The authors offer that using the more precise terms academic progress and academic success will clarify these contradictory perspectives on academic achievement and illuminate the complexities that teachers encounter when preparing to teach in a post–No Child Left Behind context.
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In a bullying encounter, we ask why a bully bullies in the first place, but part of such an inquiry almost always includes a focus on the victim—that is, what is it about the victim that draws the ire of the bully? Researchers have spent great effort seeking to understand the motivations behind bullying, including why victims are targetable. Once we understand what causes a victim to be targeted, then, we believe, we can “fix up” the victim (to make him or her less targetable), and we can focus our work with the bully—helping him or her to be more tolerant of the “targetable” qualities held by the victim. But research also indicates that we may actually be asking the wrong question. Although bullying involves a victim and a bully, the literature also describes bullying as a social event, most often enacted within the purview of onlookers, accomplices, and bystanders. In this commentary, I argue that the victim is often incidental to the bullying encounter (i.e., the bully typically isn’t annoyed with, angry with, or threatened by the victim). Rather, the bully’s focus is on those watching the encounter—seeking to gain status with peers through the public domination of a classmate.
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Using a national sample, this study uses multilevel modeling to understand how self-reported levels of academic engagement differ between women who attend single-sex and coeducational high schools.
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This article examines high schools’ responses to exit testing policies through in-depth case studies of five low-performing high-poverty high schools across five school districts in Texas.
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(The following is edited and elaborated from my comments in this BrillKids Forum discussion. The BrillKids Forum is awesome.)
I had an interesting conversation with Dr. Miles Jones, an accelerated learning and memorization expert. I asked him for his advice on how we might best remember the things that we are learning in our book-reading. After all, H. and I read an awful lot of books, and while I’m sure some of it does sink in, most of it becomes implicit memory (the sort of memory that makes you go, “Oh, yeah, I remember that,” when someone reminds you of a fact–but which you can’t articulate when someone asks you about the fact). This strikes me as a perennial problem for education, one that teachers seem to assume is solved by exams and finals. As homeschoolers, we don’t have to do exams, so I am free to explore other, possibly more efficient ways to solve the problem.
Now, apart from those exams, most of us go through our schooling with very little memory work, and we don’t think it’s pointless to read books just because we’ll forget most of them. If we didn’t read them, we’d be really ignorant. So if that’s how it has to be with my boys, I’m resigned to their fate. They’ll still be well-educated.
But what if there is a way to retain more of what we learn? Obviously, always re-reading books after reading them once will help do the trick. But ultimately, you can’t read as much that way and it’s not clear that you would learn a lot more that way.
Anyway, Dr. Jones gave me an intriguing answer. He said that you’d review the information one hour, one day, one week, one month, and one year later. Seems this is something that people in the field often say. He recommended that I highlight the info I want H. to retain as we read, then read the highlighted portions into a recorder, then we simply listen to the recording a day, a week, a month, etc., later.
So, never one to pass up trying out some easily testable idea, and since I have a nice handheld recorder and am an unimaginably fantastic user of it (not really, but I know how to edit sound files and stuff), I decided to give it a try.
For a couple of days, I was doing 12 minutes of summaries per day. I quickly calculated that, while continuing on that way might seem admirably ambitious, it’s really just plain crazy. I mean, it’s OK as long as you’re reviewing just one of these recordings per day. But suppose you limit the recordings to 10 minutes a day, and each day you are reviewing recordings from a day ago, a week ago, a month ago, a season ago, a year ago, and two years ago. That would be 60 minutes per day of listening to yourself summarize stuff that you read…that long ago. Have you ever heard of anyone doing such a thing?
Now, H. expressed great enthusiasm after listening to our first recordings. We talked about it and he said basically that it was a lot of fun, because it reminded him of what he knows. His reaction surprised me. I thought it was pretty interesting, most of the time, but maybe not that exciting. I did see two great advantages aside from the long-term memory aspect. First, it immediately reinforces what we just read. That alone might make the practice worth doing. Second, H. (when he pays attention to my summary while I make it–he doesn’t always) gets a very lively idea of what a good summary “narration” looks like. I flatter myself that I am good at summarizing things I’ve just read quickly and accurately, and picking out the important points.
But I just can’t imagine that we’ll want to listen to a full hour of this stuff every day. Eventually, I saw reason, as I’ll explain further down.
Then I thought, suppose it were (somehow) practical. But is it really desirable? Well, there are several considerations here. The first is knowledge. Knowledge is good, and we want to maximize it. Second is love of knowledge, or motivation–a different thing. We don’t want to burn out kids (or parents) by requiring too much of anything or more than tolerable of what is tedious. Third is pleasure, we want life fun, especially life for children. Fourth is opportunity cost–even if it is in all a benefit to do, would the time we spend on this be better spent on something else (like reading more books)?
Would it be worthwhile in this sense? I tend to believe Dr. Jones. I’ve heard his advice before, I don’t know where, and it’s very plausible that jogging your memory according to that pattern would help you retain information that otherwise would be forgotten. Well, if so, it would be extremely valuable. It might even be worth some unpleasantness, or at least foregoing of more intense pleasures. After all, what we’re talking about is remembering a hell of a lot more stuff than you would remember otherwise. Suppose that someone could wave a magic wand and suddenly you’d remember, instead of 20% of what you learned in school, more like 60%. (I’m picking numbers out of the air, but you get the idea.) You know that, right now, you’d be a lot better-informed than you are. Having a handle on all that information would in turn enable you to draw connections and make insights that are unavailable to you because, well, you’ve forgotten so much. Reflecting on this makes me wonder if this is something that we should all be doing, even as adults. Should we be spending an hour each day simply reminding ourselves of what we have already learned? I don’t know. It sounds like a fascinating idea to consider, though. (I have since been informed that some people actually do this.)
Another consideration I’ve been thinking about, however, is that we might very well achieve a similar effect simply by reading increasingly difficult books on the same subjects that we’ve already studied. In this way, maybe we don’t have to review, and we get a similar effect. Perhaps–but I don’t think so. Even someone who revisits the same fact four times in his education, in increasingly difficult contexts, might still forget it because it never, on any of the passes, makes it into long-term memory. But the method Dr. Jones describes is designed specifically to get those facts into long-term memory. Reviewing info a day and a week later, in particular, seems important to getting it into long-term memory. My guess is the month and three-month reviews will set the neural pathways quite well. Then one will likely come across the information later in one’s education, and if one is still using the same memory technique, and one has forgotten it, then it will be revived all over again. Of course, that assumes that the technique would be used long-term…
So anyway, I was off and running. That was about five weeks ago. After about five days, H. was very excited about the memory method. He said twice that he was grateful to Dr. Jones for suggesting it. (H. is a very weird kid.) But after a week, H. started resisting, a little. Then he went back to being fully supportive, then resisting, and so forth. A couple times, I’ve started talking like maybe we’ll quit and he quickly backtracked and said he likes recordings, he learns a lot from them, and so forth. It effortful to listen to these recordings, but it’s a “good hurt.” He and I both are learning a lot.
A week in, I wrote, “I am 90% sure that within a week to a month, we’re going to either give up on this or completely change it.” Well, it’s been a month, and we’ve made only one significant change: I made a big effort to reduce the recording amount per day to no more than eight minutes. Rarely, it’s more and often it’s closer to five and sometimes three. Let me put this in terms of the length of time spent summarizing individual readings: instead of three minutes to summarize a reading that took 20 minutes, I summarize in 2 or 1.5. Shorter readings get just a minute or less. There are some books that are just really hard to summarize so quickly, and I indulge in longer summaries. Anyway, using shorter summaries makes the whole thing much more doable. This did require that I reduce the amount of information I put into recordings, but really that’s OK; the big important points are the ones we really want to remember anyway, of course.
I have tried to get H. to do summaries. I have tried to train him, give him examples, explain about the main idea, etc. We have been practicing outlining stories, and he’s not bad at doing that, with some help from me. But none of this training makes it feasible for him to do summaries on the tape recorder. Actually, there was one that he did that was actually a summary rather than a word-for-word reading with commentary, out of a half-dozen tries. So, if we want to do this memory method, then for now, I have to make the recordings. I expect I’ll continue to have to do them for at least another year or two. When he starts doing more reading to himself (when I start reading more to the baby at the table instead of him–which I suspect will be reasonably soon), either he won’t do summaries of those readings, or he’ll have to learn to do them quickly and accurately (seems like a non-starter right now), or we’ll have to figure out something else, I don’t know what.
In case someone is interested in technique/how-to, here are a few more notes.
I summarize only nonfiction and poetry, not fiction (except for myth–I treated Norse myth like nonfiction). We’ll read, say, 20 minutes during breakfast, and then I’ll wander away from the noisy family and take a few minutes to make the recording (often yelling to H. and others to be quiet). I don’t mark up the books, because it isn’t necessary. I keep a thumb on the Pause/Record button, and record only when I know what I want to say, and pause as soon as I run out of things to say. Whether I summarize or simply pull out interesting facts depends on the kind of nonfiction. For example, with the Usborne Encyclopedia of World History, there’s no summarizing it because it’s not a narrative, so I just record the most important facts. But with the Look-It-Up Book of Presidents, a summary usually hits the factual high points too. When we read poems (Piping Down the Valleys Wild, these days), we usually read from 5-10 poems, depending on how many we really try to analyze, and then what I do is simply ask H. which one he wants to record. If we read a famous poem, I will record that one in any case, which means that yesterday I recorded two poems; that’s OK, because kid poems are short and are nice to listen to in the recording. He often picks or goes along with a famous one. I find I have to speak with a very clear voice, i.e., not slurring and aspirating consonants, or the recording can be difficult to understand. Speaking too quickly is a mistake, but so is using lots of um’s and pauses. The most efficient way all around (to keep recording times down but also to make a listenable recording) is to speak clearly and deliberately, but without long pauses. Brief pauses are necessary for the listener to be able to mentally process the recording. It also helps for listenability if you keep the recording as dramatic or at least as interestingly worded as possible. It would be nice if the recordings word made by a professional voice person, but since that’s not possible, just try to sound clear, convincing, engaged, maybe excited, but definitely not bored.
I use a Sony Digital Voice Recorder, I think it cost me something like $200 back when I was recording music sessions. It comes with some pretty good software (“Digital Voice Editor”), which makes it easy to save recordings quickly, organize them, and convert recording formats if necessary. At first I was saving recordings to wav format, but this increased the file size so I decided to stick with Sony’s proprietary .msv format, which combines high quality with low file size. As long as I have the software, it’s easier to go with this than to convert to wav. I also used to combine the day’s recordings automatically (which the software makes it easy to do), but H. didn’t like that, and I also found it somehow satisfying (as opposed to annoying) to start each short recording individually.
As to how I organize the recordings: I have a “Recordings” folder. Each day gets its own new folder, where I put the day’s three to six recordings. It’s easy enough to find the recordings from a week ago. After we’ve listened to the 1-week recording, I transfer it to the “To review one month” folder. After we’ve listened to the recording made one month ago (I go with the same numbered day last month, resigning myself to some confusion as there are greater or fewer days at the end of months…it’ll all work out), I transfer that to a “To review three months” folder. It’s usually easy enough to find the recording to review–it’s the oldest one in any given folder (together with yesterday’s recording).
Sometimes we don’t get around to listening to yesterday’s recording after dinner (the reserved time) so we do it early the next day.
I have noticed that it takes a considerable amount of attention to stay focused throughout what is now 15-25 minutes of recordings to listen to. The recordings are, after all, nothing but information. The only reason we can stick with it is that it does, after all, remind us of something we read, and that usually has some interest for us. Sometimes I have to settle H. down…he is only five, after all…I’m not meaning to brag, but I am sure that most kids wouldn’t be able to do this. As hyper and independent as he can be, H. actually has a remarkably good attention span and he’s a very geeky kid. Just as I thought he would be. (To illustrate that further, we recently started learning/playing with Scratch, a programming language learning program from MIT, and he just plays with it endlessly as he would a game. I’m not sure if he’s learning much, but, well, he’s learning something…) Baby E. is very different, we can and do read him books, but not like I read to H. I simply can’t sit down with him anytime, the way I did with H., and read any number of books–even though I try pretty often. He has to be in the mood and it’s only one or two board books at a time. He’s also more extraverted and sociable. So if we can do this with baby E. when he is five, I’ll be very surprised.
As to the “success” of the memory method, I still haven’t tested H. on much since we first started the memory method a month ago. I am very sure that he does not remember 100% or even 80% of the facts, in the sense that I might ask a straightforward short answer question based on some statement made in the recordings, and he would give me a more or less complete and correct answer. My guess is that the number is closer to 50%. Still, I do have the distinct impression that he’s learning significantly more because of these recordings than if we had not used them.
I have had one confirming bit of evidence. We were going through the Story of the World (Vol. 2, we’re 2/3 of the way through this…along with the other 3+ history sources we’re covering at the same time) test book orally. We did some quizzes over material we read over a month ago, and some quizzes over material we covered in recordings. He didn’t get 100% on the latter (several of the questions weren’t even covered in the recordings) but he definitely did better.
I also had the impression that the questions he did best on (i.e., he was most confident on, or said the answer before the multiple choice options were given, or was confident of the answer and turned out to be correct when I wasn’t sure, etc.) were questions over information that appeared in multiple sources we’ve read. Whether this better performance is due to sheer repetition, or having the information embedded in different, complementary contexts, or something else, I do think it’s a good idea to use multiple sources when learning history, science, geography, and other such subjects. We find it indispensible to use multiple math systems concurrently as well, he simply wouldn’t understand math nearly as well if we weren’t using Singapore and MEP and 2+2 is not 5 (almost done with this).
Still, doing recordings definitely seems to be highly beneficial memory training, so far. We’ll see if we can keep it up for the “one season” and “one year” reviews–doesn’t seem likely, but it’s possible. Then we’ll really have a good idea of how beneficial this method is. One thing seems fairly sure to me already: it won’t give you perfect memory of everything you’ve read. It will simply improve your recall and ultimately deepen your understanding. While doing this, we started reading about physics in depth. We’ve read a lot about Newton’s three laws. The combination of reading about them in 4-5 different books (really! It’s amazing how many accessible, simple explanations of physics are out there!) and listening to summaries of all of these as well has really helped them to sink in. The proof will come in a year–we’ll see if H. (or I!) can remember them well enough to explain them then, long after we’ve moved on to chemistry.
This article addresses the potential impact of the Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (2009) Supreme Court ruling and the influence of the documentary form on democratic education. The author calls for critical media education to be a core tenet of democratic education in order to prepare citizens for the 21st century.
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Warning: this post has links to pages that are definitely not safe for work or school. I’ll warn you which ones those are with “NSFW.”
The post has two parts. The first is about the availability of porn on Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, which for most people reading this is probably old news; but they’ve reached some new lows, such as actual pornographic films. The second part contains what I think is real news: that the much-debated porn filter they were developing is no longer in development and looks likely to be dropped.
I
There are, as many people reading this know very well, stupendous amounts of explicit imagery on Commons as well as Wikipedia itself; simply search for any fetish, porn industry term, or body part, and you’ll be likely to find it illustrated literally ad nauseam. Users, whether they like it or not, can be exposed to all sorts of inappropriate, explicit content when doing perfectly innocuous searches. This degree of smut is obviously inappropriate for an Internet resource touted as “educational” and promoted for classroom use.
Almost two years ago, I reported the Wikimedia Foundation to the FBI (as I was required to by law) on grounds that Wikimedia Commons was hosting two image categories, labeled “Pedophilia” and “Lolicon,” which featured depictions of child sexual abuse. I tracked the fallout in two posts. Recently, FoxNews.com followed up their coverage, reporting that little had been done since then. The Fox News reporter did a good job, I think. But some more developments have come to light.
The pervy categories are still there, and include whole hierarchies of categories under the titles “Erotic images of children” (NSFW) and “Child sexuality” (NSFW). The garbage by Martin van Maele, who drew many illustrations of children being sexually abused in the early 20th century, is still there, aggressively and proudly defended by the powers-that-be on Wikimedia Commons as “historical” and “educational.” To give you an idea of the attitude of the pedophilia sympathizers on Commons, who clearly feel themselves to be put-upon and wronged, consider that there is a so-called “Hate for pedophiles” category which has existed, unmolested, since May 2010 (which, come to think of it, is the month when my FBI report made news). Consider also (as was recently pointed out to me) that the activists-for-free-porn on Commons have been awarding each other the new, outrageously gross, “Hot Sex Barnstar” (NSFW!) for their efforts. There are clearly some (to me) extremely unsavory characters involved who have made it their mission to make Commons, and Wikipedia as well, as free as possible to host the most explicit sorts of imagery on this tax-exempt, non-profit 501(c)(3) website.
Recently I received an email from someone who follows this issue. He called a few things to my attention. One item: a convicted child pornographer has apparently been prominently involved in curating adult pornography. It seems he is one of those who loves to use Commons to post pervy naked pictures of himself–discussion here. He is probably not the only one. Another item: Commons is now hosting an antique video (really, really NSFW) which I am told (I didn’t watch the whole thing) shows a dog fellating a woman (in a nun’s habit) and a man.
The Wikipedia community’s more prurient tendencies are, so far from being reined in and moderated, exercised more boldly than ever.
II
My correspondent also directed me to this extremely interesting discussion on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list (Foundation-L). Read both pages–here is page 2. As I write this, discussion is ongoing.
This discussion has revealed two pieces of news so far.
First, the powers-that-be at the WMF have directed their programmers to stop working on their opt-in “controversial content” (including porn) filter. They have higher priorities, we are told.
This needs some background. The very least that Wikipedia could do, on this issue, is to let people turn on a filter so that they (or the children using their computers) would not be shown porn and other grossly inappropriate content. In fact, my understanding is that the porn would merely be “collapsed,” meaning that the user could still easily display it by “uncollapsing” the image. This, as sane people can agree, sounds both welcome and completely uncontroversial. This is what the WMF’s consultant recommended in 2010, and it was widely assumed, after a referendum indicated general support (if lukewarm), that it would be implemented soonish. After all, the tool would simply let people turn on a personal filter. (It wouldn’t be turned on automatically–users would have turn it on in user settings.) And the filter would only hide “controversial” images, not completely block them. But, no. There’s no compromise on porn in Wikipedia-land, despite this being an “educational” project constitutionally committed to consensus and compromise. They want their commitment to free speech so loudly proclaimed that two full-color vulvas greet you at the top of the page (with a variety of others further down), should you have the temerity to look up the subject on Wikipedia. There has been such a groundswell of loud opposition to the opt-in filter idea that the project was never implemented.
This leads me to the second piece of news. It appears that two Wikimedia Foundation Board members, Kat Walsh and Phoebe Ayers, have both changed their positions. The Board was sharply divided on the need of this filter (which is just as amazing and silly as it sounds) last fall, but things have become even sillier since then. There is more community opposition, and so Ms. Walsh and Ms. Ayers no longer support it. They strongly imply that the earlier decision to build a filter is now a dead letter.
This says something very disappointing and even disturbing about the Wikimedia Foundation as an institution. It certainly looks as though they are in the thrall of anarchist porn addicts whose scorn for the interests of children–the group of users that stands to gain the most from a high-quality free encyclopedia–is constrained only by the limits of the law, and maybe not even that.
Eighteen months ago, after speaking at length to both WMF Executive Director Sue Gardner and the consultant she hired, Robert Harris, I had the distinct impression that the WMF might be capable of prevailing on Wikipedia and Commons to the extent of, at least, installing a completely innocuous opt-in filter system. So color me disillusioned.
I don’t wish any grief or embarrassment upon Wikipedia’s more sensible managers, like those I’ve mentioned–Gardner, Ayers, and Walsh. They are clearly right that politically they’re in a “damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t” situation. But given the choice, I’d rather be damned for doing the bare minimum needed to meet the needs of children, or at least trying to do that, than be more richly damnable for not doing anything. I’d suck it up and remind myself that there are quite a few more important things than power and status. Since such a complete no-brainer as an opt-in filter is currently politically impossible, Gardner and other sane adults among the Wikimedia managers face a dilemma: maintain some degree of power in the organization, but implicitly supporting what is only too clearly a deeply dysfunctional and irresponsible organization; or resign. If I were Gardner, or a member of the Board, I would seriously consider resigning and making a clear and pointed public statement.
Ultimately, the WMF, which has legal responsibility for the project–and which is supposed to be the grown-up, after all–has shown in its inability to act on this issue that it cannot avoid a truly spectacular scandal or a really serious lawsuit. The potential trouble isn’t that the government might shut Wikipedia down, or slap it with judgments it can’t repay. Rather, the biggest potential trouble is a mass exodus of profoundly disillusioned contributors, which is surely the Achilles’ heel of a project with tens of millions of articles and files to manage.
If she really wanted to take serious leadership on this issue, what Gardner might do is spearhead a brand new project to use some of the many millions they’ve amassed and start a serious Wikipedia for young people, one that K-12 teachers can be proud to use with their students. It could be a curated version of Wikipedia. It would not only have obvious controls regarding age-appropriate content, it would also have reviewed versions of articles, Citizendium-style. They could brag that they have finally adopted “flagged revisions,” which the media has been repeatedly led to believe is “right around the corner.”
I do not think the WMF needs to ask the Wikipedia rank-and-file to vote on this. Or, if they ask those people, they should also ask their contributors to vote on it, as well. The WMF has to ask itself: who are we serving, the Wikipedia rank-and-file, which is dominated by anarchist porn addicts, or readers? Are they sensible enough to answer this question correctly?
As an added bonus, if a WMF-supported responsible version of Wikipedia existed and were growing healthily, then I would shut up about the X-rated version of Wikipedia. Maybe.
This commentary focuses on cyberbullying, which is a growing national concern. Special attention is given to the dilemma faced by school authorities in their efforts to comply with increasingly prescriptive antibullying mandates, which may generate constitutional challenges that disciplinary action abridges students' First Amendment rights.
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