Breakfast Links: Teachers, Students & Obama
I blogged about RateMyTeacher.com awhile ago, now I’ve just read about a bunch of Aussie teachers who are suing RateMyTeacher over some bad ratings they got. I have no idea about the fairness of the suit or the quality of the teachers, but you just have to believe that this is the future for the company. My fear is that worse than bad ratings, which are just whatever, is that it is really only a matter of time before some really defamatory statements show up on a site that could seriously and aversely affect someone’s life. Kids anonymously rating teachers? It’s a timebomb, know what I mean?
Now on the flip side you read about this kid who made a game mod and mapped his school into the game. What does he get for that? He gets booted out of his school to ride the short bus to the alternative education center. WTF? I can remember when I first heard you could do such a thing - it was in college and the very first thing I thought of, it was pretty much …” Oh you can make your own maps? Huh. Let’s make a map of the computer center!” Obviously. Because it’s a game and because that’s the place I knew enough to make a map of. And it would be funny to play the other kids on a map that we all knew and in fact were in. Ugh.
And then you read about how the Obama campaign kicked out the volunteer who built them a MySpace page that attracted 160,000 friends over the course of about 2 years. He’d been working this on the side and as you can imagine, this was a huge job, many hours a day. He’d already been in touch with the Obama campaign, even given them passwords so they could make any changes they need to be made. When the work finally became to much for one employed person to handle and Joe Anthony asked to be paid for the work he was doing, they decided to cut him out of the loop. Obama’s staff went to MySpace who cut Joe out of the page and that’s the story. You’ll have to excuse the article for trying to make a new word “Barocket”, get it? get it? Yeah. Vomit.
