<p>East Stroudsburg U. Suspends Professor for Facebook Posts
By Mary Helen Miller</p>
<p>Gloria Y. Gadsden, an associate professor of sociology at East Stroudsburg University of Pennsylvania, was escorted off the campus on Wednesday because of jokes she had made on her Facebook page about wanting to kill students.</p>
<p>On Monday the professor posted this update: "Had a good day today, didn't want to kill even one student.:-) Now Friday was a different story ..." In another comment, on January 21, she wrote: "Does anyone know where I can find a very discrete hitman, it's </p>
<p>Most people don’t bother setting their privacy choices, most defaults are set to share almost everything. But even if you have your privacy settings set correctly, once it is in cyberspace whatever you wrote is gone and you can not retrieve it. </p>
<p>I think the teacher was insensitive with her comments - even if they were a joke and supposedly private, after Columbine and Virginia (and all the others), you DO NOT make those comments in any type of public setting.</p>
<p>Do people never learn? Discussing your workplace in any fashion on your Facebook page, blog or elsewhere online, no matter how facetiously, is just stupid and tasteless–the woman was “dooced” (see below), and rightfully so. From Wikipedia:</p>
<p>“In 2002, [blogger Heather] Armstrong ignited a fierce debate about privacy issues when she was allegedly fired from her job as a web designer and graphic artist because she had written satirical accounts of her experiences at a dot-com startup on her personal blog, dooce.com. She did not challenge her termination and has refrained from identifying her place of employment in interviews. Armstrong warns her fellow bloggers: ‘I started this website in February 2001. A year later I was fired from my job for this website because I had written stories that included people in my workplace. My advice to you is BE YE NOT SO STUPID.’ ‘Dooced’ can mean ‘getting fired for something you’ve written on your website,’ a sense supported by the Urban Dictionary… This definition was used by the television game show Jeopardy! on December 10, 2009, as evidenced by a screenshot on her blog the following day.”</p>
<p>BE YE NOT SO STUPID, and don’t be “dooced”.</p>
<p>Then why do so many students get away with posting drunken pictures of themselves on the Internet and not get in trouble for it? Every now and then I see a news article about something like that, where the students get in trouble, but there have to be way more students than that posting. How do colleges find this stuff, and why aren’t they finding it all?</p>
<p>“Most people don’t bother setting their privacy choices, most defaults are set to share almost everything. But even if you have your privacy settings set correctly, once it is in cyberspace whatever you wrote is gone and you can not retrieve it.”</p>
<p>I have my privacy settings at configured at the highest level but I still don’t trust them. I feel the same way about emails and texts. If you want to get at that info, you can. Come on, hackers can break into federal databases…I think it would be possible to break through privacy settings on facebook. </p>
<p>This professor…hmm…not very smart. I have folks in my fb group who post really inappropriate things. I can’t believe how stupid they are. Me? banal things like “Can’t believe we’re getting more snow” - sometimes I wonder if it’s worth the time. Though I DO like to see pics from family and friends.</p>
<p>And another thing that bothers me. When people die, the first place media goes these days is facebook. And they report all sorts of stuff. Seems like an invasion of privacy to me…but hey…if you put it out there…I guess it’s fair game.</p>