From my article in The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/article/Former-King-of-Campus-Gossip/130353/)

 

Matt Ivester became notorious on campuses across the country in 2007 for publishing gossip­—not about celebrities but about students—on Juicy-Campus, the Web site he created. The site was blocked by some colleges, banned by several student governments, and threatened with legal action by several students who claimed that defaming comments on the site had inflicted emotional damage.

Now, in an ironic twist, the young man who stubbornly hosted reputation-harming comments on a Web site despite student complaints is looking to reinvent himself as an adviser to help students clean up their online reputations.

In his book, lol… OMG!: What Every Student Needs to Know About Online Reputation Management, Digital Citizenship and Cyberbullying, Mr. Ivester recounts several cautionary tales of students trashing their reputations due to poor choices on the Internet, but he gives little mention of the role JuicyCampus played in defaming countless students. (But at one point, he does acknowledge that his creation regularly drew comments that were “racist, homophobic, misogynistic, vulgar, sexually explicit, deeply personal—you name the type of offense, and it was there.”)

Today Mr. Ivester says he is sorry for his now-defunct site, and that had he known then what he does now about online-reputation management, he never would have started it.

While running JuicyCampus, Mr. Ivester argued that students needn’t worry about false accusations posted on the site because the truth would eventually emerge when others came to their defense. Relax, he told angry students at the time, an anonymous free-for-all will be self-policing.

His book, by contrast, advises that students should be hands-on in both keeping unwanted information off­line and making sure the most positive information is the stuff most likely to be found by potential employers or anyone else looking.

His new message is one that a growing number of colleges are trying to convey to students through educational Web sites and courses designed to raise awareness of privacy pitfalls online.

Students can probably find a better source than Mr. Ivester to teach them the lessons of the unforgiving Internet, said Tracy Mitrano, Cornell University’s director of IT policy. “First he wanted to make his money by adversely affecting campus community relationships, and now he wants to do it by saying how much he wants to help students,” she said.

Mr. Ivester admits that online-reputation management wasn’t on his mind when he created JuicyCampus, but at the time he wasn’t the only one to overlook the consequences of their online actions. Despite the ubiquity of the Internet, “online identity management” hadn’t yet seeped into society’s technological lexicon.

Monitoring one’s digital footprint is a more-common practice today, and administrators and professors say they hope today’s students will learn from the mistakes of those who blazed the trail before them. Including Mr. Ivester.

Teaching ‘Digital Natives’

Basic expectations of privacy are getting rewired.

Today almost everything a person does online is recorded and tracked—something not everyone is comfortable with, or even aware of.

“I think we’re still learning what it means to have zero degrees of freedom,” said Munir Mandviwalla, chair of Temple University’s Management Information Systems department. Mr. Mandviwalla, who teaches his students how to create e-portfolios, Web pages with the best of their academic work, says he regularly coaches students to be more aware of all the content a person creates online.

Students today are part of the “so-called Facebook generation,” so they should understand what it means to leave detailed digital tracks, says Mr. Mandviwalla. But that doesn’t mean they understand all the consequences of their online socializing.

Mr. Ivester, in explaining how he chose his book’s title, writes how students messing around on the Internet found their actions funny at the time (hence the lol, or “laughing out loud”), until they were hit with the unintended consequences (OMG!).

Alexandra Wallace, a student who uploaded an anti-Asian rant to YouTube, is one such example Mr. Ivester gives in the book. (The book does not name her, but the story was widely reported in the press.) Ms. Wallace, a junior at the University of California at Los Angeles, only intended to share the video she made with her friends, but it soon went viral, receiving hundreds of thousands of hits. Ms. Wallace later issued a public apology, but it wasn’t enough—she started getting death threats, according to the book, and eventually dropped out of school.

Ms. Wallace may have chosen YouTube because she figured it would be an easy way to share the video with friends, but she may not have thought about some of those same friends possibly reposting the video to Facebook or other social-media platforms. Mr. Ivester says he learned a similar lesson while running JuicyCampus.

One student, who was a victim not only of rape but also of online gossip, was horrified when she saw her classmates mocking her ordeal on the JuicyCampus Web site, her professor wrote in aChronicle commentary. This type of malicious gossip marred students’ reputations but drove the JuicyCampus traffic, so Mr. Ivester ignored its scarring effects. “My laissez-faire attitude toward information and opinions back then has changed,” he said, because he now recognizes the importance of managing one’s digital identity.

Plenty of people at the time attempted to clue Mr. Ivester in to the problems his site was causing. Officials from Duke University who had known him while he was a student contacted him privately to try to persuade him to take down the site. He refused.

In the end, Mr. Ivester shut down the site only when the money ran out. As a message on the Juicy­Campus blog in 2009 explained, “in these historically difficult economic times, online ad revenue has plummeted and venture capital funding has dissolved.” He ended with his trademark sign-off: “Keep it Juicy.”

Defense Tactics

Colleges should play a part in teaching online-reputation management, Ms. Mitrano says, because a person’s online identity now touches every facet of life, including the academic, the professional, and the social.

Most colleges, she says, are already guiding students. At Cornell, the university provides practical tips on its digital-literacy Web site. Other colleges, such as Michigan State University, offer full courses on the subject. Emilee Rader, who teaches “Your Digital Footprint: Privacy and the Online Information Explosion” at Michigan State, previously taught it at Northwestern University. “The goal of the course is not to turn people into computer scientists,” said Ms. Rader, an assistant professor at Michigan State’s college of communication, “but rather, it’s to expose them to some of the inner workings of the Internet so they understand that anything they do online can be recorded by anyone at any time.”

Helping people with their online presence is also an emerging industry. Simply search Google for “online reputation management,” and the results will reveal the wide variety of companies offering just such a service. Reputation.com is first on that list.

Michael Fertik, chief executive of the company, says business is booming and that many soon-to-be-college-grads use his company’s service to assess their online presence before entering today’s competitive job market. “Digital natives,” he added, often care even more about their online reputations than those in previous generations because they have come of age hearing how tough the job market is and how their online activity can affect their already limited chances of landing a job.

Fred Stutzman, a postdoctoral fellow researching social media and privacy issues at Carnegie Mellon University, agrees. He recently started a similar service called claimID.com.

Privacy, he says, is something that people must “talk into existence” and something that society should value more. For universities, this means showing students the benefits of having an online presence and being conscious of their digital footprints.

“The problem schools inherently face with younger students is that they’re socially required to spend time online and engage with their peers,” so they are constantly generating more and more content online, Mr. Stutzman said.

Some of the most-sensitive content is posted on JuicyCampus copycat Web sites that have recently emerged, which Mr. Ivester says are on the rise. The sites began on college campuses, but new iterations single out high-school and middle-school students, acting as breeding grounds for young cyberbullies. And changes in technology are raising new issues. “I predict that the next big thing in college gossip,” Mr. Ivester writes in his book, “will be proximity-based message boards, accessible only through cellphone apps using GPS,” which will “allow anyone to create a group (for example, the name of a dorm) and then allow anyone nearby to anonymously post to and read that dorm’s continuous gossip feed.”

Which will likely leave many frustrated students looking for advice.

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How to Manage Your Online Reputation

Professors and college administrators offer eight tips on how to protect your online identity.

1. Google yourself. Know what others see when they search your name.

2. Don’t disappear completely. People want to find you online, so use social networks such as LinkedIn to create spaces where you can promote your professional self.

3. Check the privacy settings on social networks. Make sure you know what you are sharing and with whom—and if you are not sure about something, then don’t post it.

4. Remember you are never anonymous. Almost any content you create and post online can be traced back to you.

5. Only keep profiles you maintain. Unattended profiles may raise questions, so it’s best to just erase the inactive ones.

6. Brush up on copyright and plagiarism laws. Ignorance is no excuse.

7. Keep your passwords to yourself. Don’t open the door for others to post content under your name, even if it’s just a practical joke.

8. Keep in mind that the Internet is forever.

Guest writer Robert H. Seidman of Southern New Hampshire University talks more about the three-year degree on Daniel de Vise’s blog, College Inc:

“Higher education is at a breaking point. The cost of a college education has spiraled out of control, leaving deserving students priced out of a bright future and putting our nation at risk of losing much-needed talent. Many states are reducing funding for state supported colleges and universities driving the cost of securing an education even higher. Therefore, a three-year degree that can save students 25 percent and colleges almost that much looks attractive to many families, politicians and government officials.

The Post’s editorial advocating three-year college degrees makes a lot of sense, and it also raises many important questions.

While pricing citizens out of higher education is bad for them and bad for our nation, some may rightly question whether or not students can truly learn as much in three years as they can in four. Are three-year graduates as employable as four-year graduates? Also, is it possible for colleges to save educational delivery costs by offering three-year programs? The answer to all of these questions is a resounding “Yes.” Southern New Hampshire University’s (SNHU) three-year degree model is the proof.

SNHU’s three-year degree program in business administration graduated its 12th class in May and is the longest-running three-year program of its kind in the nation. Students attend and pay for just six semesters and are not required to take summer or winter-session courses. They score on a par with or above their four-year counterparts on nationally normed major tests and fully participate in extra-curricular activities, including NCAA athletics.

The SNHU program is based upon competencies, which consist of knowledge and skills. Together, these competencies define what a college-educated person should know and be able to do. Employers are happy because they are assured that graduates from competency-based programs have earned a high-quality education. Students are well prepared to go on to graduate school, and many do. The SNHU retention and graduation statistics are quite remarkable with an overall first-to-second-year retention rate of 87 percent, in contrast to a 71 percent national rate for four-year students. The overall on-time SNHU three-year-graduation rate is 79 percent compared to a national on-time four-year-graduation rate of 39 percent.

What makes this model different from the typical accelerated three-year model is a competency-based approach where learning, not class-time, is the constant. For example, public speaking instruction is built into almost all courses in the first three semesters so that students don’t have to take the separate public speaking course that four-year students must take. At the end of their third semester, students are awarded three credits for public speaking coursework if they have attained the requisite competencies. Although three-year students take fewer courses, they still graduate with 120 credits, the same as their four-year counterparts. The liberal arts component of their education is not diminished in any way. Offering fewer discrete courses saves the institution delivery costs which can be up to 25 percent. This is a win-win…”

Read the full story here.

Ed Schools’ Pedagogical Puzzle

By Sharon Otterman

There will be no courses at the Relay Graduate School of Education, the first standalone college of teacher preparation to open in New York State for nearly 100 years. Instead, there will be some 60 modules, each focused on a different teaching technique. There will be no campus, because it is old-think to believe a building makes a school. Instead, the graduate students will be mentored primarily at the schools where they teach. And there will be no lectures. Direct instruction, as such experiences will be called, should not take place for more than 15 or 20 minutes at a time. After that, students should discuss ideas with one another or reflect on their own.

If it all sounds revolutionary, it’s supposed to. In its promotional materials, Relay uses fiery terms to describe its mission, promising to train schoolteachers in a way that “explodes the traditional, course-based paradigm that has been adopted by traditional schools of education over the past century.” Norman Atkins, the founder of a network of charter schools and the president of Relay, talks about his program as being beyond ideology, a word he believes has a negative connotation.

“The messiah is not going to come in the blink of an eye,” Mr. Atkins said recently. But he hopes, he said, to help bring about a future in which teachers and schools use instructional techniques that are known to work and are held accountable for student performance, two core tenets of Relay.

Mr. Atkins’s goal of upending teacher training stems from a broader diagnosis shared by many who work in public education: that it is failing millions of American children, leaving them without the skills they need to succeed in the 21st century. Vastly improving teacher education, they believe, is critical in fixing that picture.

There are wide concerns that too many teachers are unprepared for the classroom, though they may have more educational credentials than ever before. Master’s degrees are required for permanent certification in only a few states, including New York and Kentucky. But data collected by the National Center for Education Statistics show that 52 percent of kindergarten through eighth-grade teachers have a master’s degree or higher — which often qualifies them for a pay bump. And so graduate school in education is big business. In the 2008-9 school year, the 178,564 master’s degrees in education that were awarded across the country accounted for 27 percent of all the master’s degrees awarded.

Over the years, some of the toughest critics of education schools have been educators themselves. In 1986, the Holmes Group, a collection of deans from education schools, warned that too many schools were indifferent to the importance of hands-on teacher preparation. Their curriculums were outmoded, and their standards for admission and graduation were lax. Major research universities accorded them a low priority. Twenty years later, Arthur Levine, the former dean of Teachers College at Columbia University, argued in a scathing report called “Educating School Teachers” that most of those problems still held true.

“While there are some wonderful teaching schools,” he told me recently, “there are some that place students at failing schools with failing teachers to learn how to teach. There are some in which the professors are really far behind the times. There is enough bad practice to justify getting rid of the bottom of the field.”

But even those calling for reform face a problem, Dr. Levine said: There is little research into what kind of training is most likely to produce a successful teacher, a fact that social scientists are now working to remedy through long-term study.

In the meantime, states, which set the rules for certifying educators, are taking an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to reform, raising the standards for existing schools while opening the door to new kinds of organizations, from online schools to charter school networks to museums, to train their teachers.

For example, New York invited nonacademic institutions to apply for $12.5 million in grants to develop and offer “clinically rich” master’s degree programs in teacher preparation. Among the 11 winning proposals, which were announced earlier this month, are the American Museum of Natural History, which already has a doctoral program in biology, along with Fordham University, Mercy College and two campuses of the City University of New York.

These changes come as large numbers of teachers already bypass traditional education degrees, entering classrooms with temporary licenses after as little as several weeks or months of pre-service training.

Today, about 500,000 of the nation’s 3.6 million teachers have entered the field through these alternative routes, such as Teach for America, mostly to work in public schools in high-poverty areas.

Even Arne Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education, has joined in questioning traditional teacher education, advising districts in a speech last year to rethink the practice of rewarding teachers with a raise for a master’s degree, because “there is little evidence teachers with master’s degrees improve student achievement more than other teachers.”

Education schools, particularly those that offer top-notch training, might be excused for feeling they are under attack.

“The rhetoric is enormously heated,” Dr. Levine said, speaking from his office at the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, where as president he helps universities restructure their teaching programs. “We have a group of education schools that are perplexed at why they are being so criticized,” he said. “We have states saying they are going to create alternate routes to becoming a teacher, and they are going to increase standards for the existing education schools.

“We are simultaneously trying to reform and replace the enterprise.”

•

It was a Saturday in May, and a full-day session of Teacher U was convening in a windowless high school classroom on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Class started at 9 a.m., and at 9:45 a.m., the master’s students were still trickling in.

They were mostly young — the average age is 25 — and dressed in weekend attire: sneakers, jeans or khakis, T-shirts and baseball caps. They nursed iced coffees and nibbled chocolate croissants and yogurt parfaits. Full-time teachers, almost all at charter schools, they work grueling hours, and they were tired. There were no books out, though one young man consulted “The 10-Day M.B.A.” during breaks. Instead, the students followed along on what the school calls “interactive handouts,” worksheets that provide exercises to accompany their teacher’s PowerPoint presentation.

The morning’s subject was “Right Is Right,” a technique in which teachers learn to hold out until their students give them answers that are 100 percent accurate. It is the second of 49 strategies cataloged in “Teach Like a Champion,” a 2010 book by Doug Lemov, a teacher and principal who founded the Uncommon Schools charter school with Mr. Atkins. Mr. Lemov’s work is such a backbone of instruction at Teacher U, students say, that he has near-guru status there, as does Dave Levin, a founder of the KIPP charter schools, and Julie Jackson, former principal of North Star Academy in Newark.

“I am a believer,” said Zach Mack, 31, a Teacher U student whom I watched one day in June deliver a dynamic social studies lesson to his fourth-grade class at Public School 139 in Flatbush, Brooklyn. He schedules each day down to the minute, and posts daily goals on the board so students can see them. “As Doug would say,” he added, “if you don’t have a plan for them, they have a plan for you.”

Teacher U opened three years ago as a program within Hunter College School of Education, part of the City University of New York. Its monthly daylong lessons take place at Hunter College High School, the college’s laboratory public school. The program has already gained attention with its nearly single-minded focus on practical teaching techniques. And this summer, when it transforms into the Relay School of Education, independent of Hunter, it will move even further away from a traditional education school model of classroom instruction and theory, sometimes above practice.

Some education theory will be integrated at Relay, Mr. Atkins insisted, but not “37 1/2 hours’ worth” — the length of the traditional three-credit course that the new school eschews. Forty percent of its coursework will be online. When students do gather, it will be mostly in small groups, mostly for discussion — expanding on a core practice at Teacher U.

Teacher U was founded by leaders from three prominent charter school chains — Achievement First, Uncommon Schools and KIPP — in part to provide a setting where their own teachers could receive master’s-level training that was tightly focused “on stuff that will help you be a better teacher on Monday,” said Brent Maddin, the program’s senior manager of teaching and learning, and Relay’s future provost.

It is one of a few examples around the country of charter organizations developing degree programs to train their own and other teachers. High Tech High in San Diego has a master’s program with training in project-based learning techniques. Such models, in turn, are part of a national movement emphasizing practical instruction for teachers already in the classroom full time.

“To make a crude analogy, if I am learning to become a blacksmith, I also don’t learn how to be a pipefitter,” Mr. Maddin said of Teacher U’s focus on pedagogical technique. “I also don’t read a ton of books about how to shoe a horse. What I do is I show up and shoe horses.”

To read the rest of the story on the Times website click here.

New life for the DREAM Act?

By Ruben Navarrette Jr.

San Diego, California (CNN) — About once a month, I’ll hear from an illegal immigrant who wants to go to Harvard.

Imagine an undocumented high school student who won’t let a little thing like not being in the country legally stop him from applying to a top university. Those who set their sights on Harvard will often seek me out for advice because, almost 20 years ago, I wrote a book about being a Latino student there.

These young people with big plans but no documents are called “Dreamers” — potential beneficiaries of the DREAM Act, which would give legal status to illegal immigrant students who attend college or join the military.

The bill was scuttled during the lame duck session in December when five conservative Senate Democrats — Jon Tester, Max Baucus, Kay Hagan, Ben Nelson, and Mark Pryor — bolted from their party to vote against cloture.

Or perhaps the senators had permission to bolt because, despite promises to Latino voters, Democrats really seem to have no interest in passing the DREAM Act and having it hung around their neck in future elections. Democrats want it both ways. They want to thwart the bill while making it look as if Republicans are to blame.

This is fine with the GOP, which seems to enjoy playing the role of villain on immigration because it helps stir up the base. On this topic, Republicans say the craziest things.

Take Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, who — as Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee — is pushing for enforcement of immigration laws. He prefers the kind of enforcement that doesn’t inconvenience employers, business, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce or anyone who contributes to Republican re-election campaigns. The San Antonio Congressman is a tough guy who only picks fights with the weak and vulnerable.

Last month, Smith told The Associated Press that the DREAM Act represented “amnesty for up to 2 million people.” When I wrote a column suggesting that he didn’t understand the term because “amnesty” is something for nothing and the DREAM Act is a quid pro quo, Smith dug himself in deeper.

“The definition of amnesty,” Smith wrote in a letter to newspapers that run my column, “is ‘the act of a government by which pardon is granted to a large number of individuals.’ And legalizing millions of illegal immigrants is just that: a pardon for violating our immigration laws. If we give amnesty to illegal immigrants who deliberately disregarded our immigration laws, it sends the message that we do not take our laws seriously.”

So a young person who was brought here as a child by his parents has “disregarded our immigration laws?” Should we consider this person a criminal seeking a “pardon?”

And is this absurdity now the official position of the Republican Party?

We might soon find out now that the DREAM Act is back on the agenda. This week, the bill got its first hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

In attendance was America’s most famous illegal immigrant: Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who recently revealed himself to be an undocumented immigrant from the Philippines in an essay for the New York Times and in ensuing media interviews.

Vargas wants to be the voice of the illegal immigrant community in the United States. He created an organization, Define American, to push for comprehensive immigration reform. But I bet what DREAM Act supporters really want is for him to be the face of their movement. Here you have an accomplished young man who has worked hard and made a substantial contribution to his profession and society as a whole.

Frankly, I’m not sure linking together the journalist and the DREAM Act is such a hot idea. Vargas is not a high school student on his way to college; he’s a professional. Besides, parts of his story don’t reflect well on him.

I found a better story. I recently met a young girl who I’ll call “Karina.” About to start her senior year at a high school in San Diego, she’s doing what many of her friends are doing: taking the SAT, preparing her college essay, making a list of schools to which she wants to apply, etc. Harvard is on the list.

Yet traveling is an issue. She can’t fly on an airplane. She doesn’t have a driver’s license. Karina is in the country illegally. She was sent here as a child and raised by relatives while her parents stayed in Mexico.

Immigration restrictionists would tell Karina to go home, but this is her home. She isn’t lying about her status to colleges, or using a fake Social Security to get financial aid. She’s looking for scholarships.

By contrast, Vargas lied to employers, used fake documents, and put colleagues who helped him and kept his secret in a tight spot.

DREAM Act supporters obviously thought that having him at the hearing would bring attention. It did. But it also clouds the issue. Vargas wasn’t a Dreamer. He was a schemer.

Young people like Karina obviously know how to aim high. When looking for role models, they can do better.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ruben Navarrette Jr.

Click here to see the article on CNN’s website.

Yesterday, while heading toward the metro after leaving a hearing on Capitol Hill, I noticed a guy jogging down one of the pathways. He was maybe 50 feet away from me, but I could only see his head and shoulders because his lower body was blocked by a line of shrubs. He was making good time and gaining on me quickly.

I swiped the back of my hand over the sweat beading on my brow.

The sun was directly overhead when he rounded the corner and I saw him shoot off at a 45 degree angle. I watched as he continued sprinting down the path: one foot pounding the pavement and the other foot…missing. He was an amputee and he could probably outrun a gazelle.

His forest green t-shirt and a crew cut hair style filled in the rest of the picture: A soldier on leave.

I watched his leg, taking in the black pliable metal that jutted out from his shorts. It attached at the knee and then curved around where his ankle should’ve been, forming a “foot”. He practically glided over the sizzling sidewalks.

 

Earlier, at the hearing on for-profit colleges, senators had been discussing all those brave young troops who fought for our country and deserved an education in return. They didn’t ask for much and we owed them that, some had said. This man deserves all that and more.

Click here to read my coverage of the hearing.