A student at the University of Calgary was put on academic probation for making the following post on a group titled, “I no longer fear Hell, I took a course with [instructor's name]:”

[Instructor's name] IS NO LONGER TEACHING ANY COURSES AT THE U OF C!!!!! Remember when she told us she was a long-term prof? Well actually she was only sessional and picked up our class at the last moment because another prof wasn’t able to do it .. lucky us. Well anyways I think we should all congratulate ourselves for leaving a [instructor's name]-free legacy for future [law and society] students.

It’s pretty hard to see how this isn’t just an expression of opinion, but the university thinks it qualifies as non-academic misconduct. The problem is, it’s not at all clear how. The only part of the definition that doesn’t involve injury, damage or theft is “conduct which seriously disrupts the lawful educational and related activities of other students and/or University staff.” It’s hard to see how a Facebook post of this nature “seriously disrupts” much of anything (until someone gets put on probation and the Streisand Effect kicks in). But there’s a nice little “includes but is not limited to” that makes the definition non-exhaustive, which is likely what university officials are relying on. You’d think that other instances of misconduct would be similar (hurting people, breaking stuff, stealing, “serious disruptions”), but apparently “expressions of opinion that we don’t like” can qualify…

A computer science professor interviewed said the posts “can be compared to putting up notices all over the university campus” (quoting the article, not the prof). But this is more like putting up a notice off campus (albeit in public). It may not have been nice, but it’s pretty troubling that a student’s right to express an opinion (free speech much?) on a third-party site is overridden without a clear policy violation.

I’ve had direct experience with this sort of thing. A couple years ago, friends of mine at another university were sent ominous emails and hauled into their department head’s office over some comments about a professor on Facebook (jokes, e.g. “crazy drunk [instructor A] is better than boring stoned [instructor B]!”). The department heads argued that the comments were “visible to the community” (similar to the “notices on campus” argument), but they clearly didn’t understand the context (wall post or message? profile or group?) or privacy settings, and they couldn’t even locate the comments on the site (someone had copied and pasted them into an email). They, too, failed to specify how any policies were actually violated (or even which ones), yet they’d gone ahead and notified the professor of the students’ comments and identities (while there was still grading to be done). We convinced them to back down and apologize, but it took a solid week, mid-semester, to deal with the mess.

Universities should understand and develop policies about social networking sites before they take action against students. If they can’t be clear about what qualifies as misconduct, how can students expect to know? What’s the difference between a Facebook group and study group? An email and a Facebook message? What difference do privacy settings make (hopefully some…)? How was this post on a Facebook group different from a review on RateMyProfessors.com? What’s the difference between off-campus speech and speech on non-school websites? Before policing student speech off-site (problematic in and of itself), universities should at least ask these questions and develop policies first. It doesn’t seem like many of them have. It’s pretty ridiculous to just throw social networking under the ambiguous “but not limited to” umbrella.

Read the comments on Techdirt.

Using social networking tools to organize political protests is nothing new or surprising, but online protests have been growing increasingly efficient, especially on Facebook. In Canada, for example, a group protesting copyright legislation caught the attention of federal parliament last summer, and another opposing strict restrictions on young drivers had the Ontario Premier considering Facebook consultations in the fall.

The latest story comes from the UK where, in a mere 48 hours, a campaign run through Facebook and TheyWorkForYou.com by mysociety.org helped stop legislation that would have exempted MPs’ expenses from the Freedom of Information Act (via the Search Engine). Thousands of emails were sent in the two day period, reaching 90% of MPs, before the opposition parties turned and the government backed down. It’s not so much the scale that’s worth noting, but the sheer speed at which the campaign was successful. The legislation was scrapped before most snail mail would have had time to arrive. Now, the online protest likely wasn’t the only factor, but it played an important role in spreading the message. It seems to be getting a lot harder to sneak stuff through the legislature (though that doesn’t stop people from trying) when it only takes a couple days to build an opposition.

Read the comments on Techdirt.

We’ve seen stories of people being fired over email and even text message before, but now there’s a story of a Canadian spa worker fired via Facebook (via Michael Geist). The woman still got dressed and went to into work that day because she thought it was a joke. Using Facebook seems rather harsh, though she admits to being hired over Facebook and the firing was done via private message (as opposed to a wall post…), but it’s no real surprise that a common method of communication eventually gets used this way. That doesn’t mean it’s not cruel, but I wouldn’t expect it to be an isolated case (we’ve already seen legal papers served via Facebook). It’s got to make you wonder what’s next though, fired via Twitter? “@unfortunatesoul btw you’re #fired sry”

Read the comments on Techdirt.

But the tides have turned! Facebook rolled out it’s new Facebooks Ads feature earlier this week, geared towards giving businesses access to advertising through the social graph. One of the key features is the new Facebook Pages which allows business to create and maintain profiles. These profiles have their own mini-feeds, are customized for various types of businesses, users can express their love/affiliation with a company or product through membership, and the business can then update those users on new developments. Check out the Facebook blog for a great overview of the new features (and reassurances about what won’t be changing, for any paranoid users or skeptics).

I discovered earlier today that Facebook Pages includes artist pages (musicians, as well as other artists, like comedians or actors)! I’m on the State Radio mailing list, and they alerted me to their new page.

Facebook has done it again! Their musician pages are better than Facebook groups and MySpace profiles combined! It appears that you can upload an unlimited amount of videos, photos and music to a page. Facebook users can click “Add to My Music” to become a fan and then receive updates, each page has it’s own mini-feed, businesses (ie. musicians) can host their own events… the list goes on!

It does the musician profile better than MySpace, and makes groups feel woefully inadequate. Yet it’s nothing terribly complex. That’s what continues to amaze me about Facebook… everything is so simple and well implemented, it just makes so much sense. But no one has ever done it so well before. There’s no single feature which is all that new in a Facebook musician’s page, but the integration of all these features with Facebook’s social graph, tidy interface, and business applications (e.g. Facebook Insights – artists receive information about their pages, such as page views, through the Facebook Page Manager application) customized and catered to musicians, amongst other artists, makes this by far the best online profile I’ve ever set up as a musician. And I’ve set up quite a few! (Take a look at my new page!)

I have no more hesitations about avoiding MySpace. The community is moving to Facebook anyways, if it isn’t already there. Facebook Pages allow me to benefit from the social networking aspects of maintaining an online profile without all the nuisances associated with MySpace.

It isn’t even a fair competition anymore. Facebook is light years ahead of everyone else.

Good riddance to MySpace!