Digital Citizenship

I can't believe it took this long to happen. I had someone post some very inappropriate things on our classroom wiki tonight.  Whoever it was, became a member of  wikispaces about 5 minutes before they started posting to the discussion. This leads me to believe that its someone who knew exactly where they wanted to go and what they wanted to say.  In other words, this was someone who was a part of either my classes or at the bare minimum a part of our school.

So, where do we go from here? I have changed the permissions to only allow members of the wiki to post to the discussion. Its worth noting here that I have no idea how I changed that to allow non-member posting in the first place.  But, beyond that? I don't know what else to do. I refuse to let the ne'er-do-wells win. I could easily make this a research paper, but then how is what I am doing different than anyone else? On the other hand, is it worth exposing my students to inappropriate language? Granted, I have learned the hard way what permissions to set, but I could see that there had already been views by students.

I guess I just have to recognize the fact that there are students who are much too immature to be given any kind of creative freedom. Too much still a child to have their leash loosened. It makes me sad. I made the decision to teach high school because of the maturity level of the students. If I wanted to put up with this kind of thing, I could have taught middle school. Sorry middle school colleagues, no offense intended, but you have to admit there should be a level of maturity at the high school that normally doesn't exist in the middle school.

Will I quit the wiki project? Uh, no. I will not. I will apologize to the students who may have had the opportunity to  read the inappropriate post and try to work with wikispaces to prevent this thing from happening again. I'm doing all I can on my end, so that should be the end of it.  However, I will also work with them to identify the student and then prosecute to the fullest extent of the law.

If you have ever had this kind of thing happen, please let me know what you did to prevent/solve it. I'm interested to hear from you.