I got a phone call from Alabama...

When I received the e-mail about the assignment this week, I personally have some close emotions relevant to this topic that I have recently experienced. I went to Tennessee this weekend to visit some friends. On Friday, one of my friends who attends the University of Alabama Huntsville campus called and was distraught. He said that there has been a shooting on campus and he is not sure what exactly has happened. He didn’t know if it was students or teachers, how many of been shot, or what was going on. I can only imagine what he was going through. This is a thought that has gone through every students head but never actually believe that they would witness something so overwhelming. The phone conversation was pretty short but I did ask how he found out that it had happened. He replied and said that he received a text message that awoken him during a nap. This made me start thinking about how emergency plans are developed on campuses for different emergency situations.

I didn’t get to talk to him again, because he was on the phone with his friends and family. As soon as I got up the next morning, I got on the internet and did some research. I started reading articles from many different websites that did not have the same story. I know they were written too soon after the event. I then kept my ears and eyes out for any more information. Monday night I came across this article:

http://abcnews.go.com/WN/female-shooter-kills-university-alabama-huntsville/story?id=9827937

After reading this article, I was shocked because I learned that the shooter was actually a TEACHER! I think that this is a very unique situation that has not been a popular situation for school shootings. A teacher who was in a meeting about future tenured plans got upset when she was denied tenured and decided to shoot the department chair and two other faculty members who were granted tenured. The department that held the shooting was biology. I am a biology TA on campus right now and can’t fathom the idea of a teacher bringing a gun into our department and shooting other faculty during a meeting. Actually re-reading the sentence that I just typed gives me the creeps. This just reminds you that you can never know when a shooting will occur and by who. I don’t know…I guess I have always stereotyped a student shooter as someone in the classroom who would keep to themselves, not have a lot of friends, and fall into the stereotype of a “loner”. After this school shooting that happened in Alabama, gives us proof that the emergency reaction plans need to include all kinds of scenarios even including the least likely scenario.

I think that every campus has an emergency plan when it comes to a school shooting. Which one is the best? Which one keeps the students and faculty the most out of harm? I don’t think there is one best emergency plan to follow. I think you have to consider a lot of facts that keep plans in reality. The size of the campus, how many students attend the school, what time of day does the emergency happen, and other factors that could affect the direction of the emergency plan that should go into effect.

This is not my area of expertise but I can say that I assumed that lockdowns were always what most schools relied on to keep their students safe and out of harm’s way. I found this quote in the following article:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/school-shootings/lockdowns.html
“Following the dramatic school shooting at Virginia Tech in April 2007 a campus law enforcement expert told an investigating panel that lockdowns at schools might not always be realistic and are difficult to execute at large schools during emergencies.”
This article was based mainly upon high school and secondary lockdown procedures and routines that they practice. I think this is a great article but does not include some of scenarios that I listed earlier for a college campus. This lockdown procedure could work at small campuses. After reading the quote though, I was surprised. I just didn’t know there were other options, but after sitting here thinking about it…I think it is a good thing.

So I did some more research….I found another article written in 2007 after the Virginia Tech shooting happened. In this article they listed the following prevention and preparedness strategies:
• Recognize that the entire campus community - students, faculty, staff, local emergency and law enforcement personnel, and neighboring areas - must be involved in prevention.
• Be prepared for crisis situations. Develop and practice contingency plans based on a variety of possible emergencies. Include student and faculty leaders who can help coordinate immediate responses.
• Develop mechanisms for communicating regularly (as well as in emergencies) with law enforcement, faculty, staff, students, parents and the community on prevention strategies and preparedness and response plans.
• Discuss school safety and security activities and plans with parents and students during school orientation. Provide reminders through the communications network to update staff, faculty, returning students and others. Consider periodic open forums to answer questions or clarify procedures.
• Bring together the campus safety team, which should include campus and community safety and security personnel, faculty, staff, students, and parents to review, update, and strengthen prevention and preparedness plans.
• Use crime analysis and crime mapping tools to help identify crime trends and issues on campus, along with incident analysis to help refine and improve prevention and response strategies
Here is the following link to the article that listed these above:
http://govpro.com/public_safety/homeland_security/gov_imp_52826/

I think that all these strategies are a good way to ensure that the emergency procedure is up to date and acceptable for many situations for a specific campus. Another great website I came across is this:
http://www.ncpc.org/

This website is the National Crime Prevention Council. This website contains blogs on recent crime prevention plans and actions that are happening all over the United States. This website could give campuses some great information on what to do when developing these emergency action plans.

Going back and reading all the things that I found and did research on, I think that the shooting at the University of Alabama- Huntsville campus will open the floor to develop emergency reaction plans that include actions on how to keep students and faculty safe if the shooter happens to be a faculty member.

Freedom to TYPE?

Well, I wanted to continue with my theme of Facebook and social networking for my next blog. I would agree that censoring what you post on these social networks is a good idea, because you never know who you are exposing your information to. I know there are some privacy options in which you can block people. But seriously….there are so many options to chose from such as a limited profile, block list, network availability, ignoring, etc. If you notice though, the default settings is that everyone can see you information and will stay like this until you decide to change it. So is there a line being created between who sees your information on these social networking sites? And if so, who is going to make this line on what is being said on these sites.

Read this article on thefire.org dealing with freedom of speech on college campuses:

http://www.thefire.org/article/10552.html

This is an article that documents a situation that happened at the University of Chicago dealing with a student posting pictures on a social networking site such as Facebook. A male student that was attending the University of Chicago at the time posted some negative pictures of his ex-girlfriend that was pretty harsh. (Just a side note)Being a female student, I would be DEVISTATED of what he posted on his Facebook page. The ex-girlfriend contacted the Dean of Students and asked that he was commanded that he had to remove the post and pictures from Facebook. The dean of students decided that it was her job to tell this male student that he needed to take off these pictures and comments because in the student handbook it states that you should treat other students with dignity and respect. The male student immediately took down the pictures.

The question that is being asked here is….Do colleges have a say on what is posted on a public off campus internet site? I think it is a violation of the student’s freedom of speech. If this was a campus internet site I could see that there could be a problem, but this was on Facebook which is not controlled by any campus. I think the male student had ever right to post what he did. They were true allegations about this girl and he had proof.

I bet you are thinking that I am crazy for supporting this male student, because I am a female. But I am trying to keep in mind the whole situation. If colleges started monitoring and censoring EVERYTHING that was on Facebook, there would be no more Facebook. There are pictures of parties, drugs, and other things that could get students in trouble all the time. This would be a headache for college administrators…spending countless hours on Facebook looking for situations to censor. Also don’t forget that I do think that it is smart to censor some of the picture that you post on Facebook, because like I said last week everyone is on Facebook. Your potential boss could be on Facebook checking out your photos after turning in your resume.

I am familiar with another website that recently was shut down. It was called Juicycampus.com. This website was the worst of worst social allegation websites. Basically anyone could post anything about anyone on campus whether it was true or not. At my undergraduate campus (6,000 students), this website was the only thing that was discussed for about a month. There was a discussion board that was about some of the athletes on another sport team that was saying some horrible things about the girls. I personally knew these girls and knew that most of what was being said was not true. This website is now shut down. I think that website was crossing the line and it was good that is was shut down. So I think there is a limit on freedom of speech on the internet.

This is the new era with technology and social networking and I think this situation is just one out of a million to come. I know there has to be more out there now similar to the University of Chicago student. I think either way, college administrators need to deal with these situations and become aware that in the future more Facebook postings will affect students on their campuses. Whether to censor what students post or not will be up to the school, but I think this needs to be addressed at all schools soon.

I thought Tweet was a noise that a bird made

I posted an article on my blog from last week that discussed about how the awareness level about global affairs of college students has risen. I do believe that technology has a huge part of this. There have been studies that show that students spend several hours of the day on the internet. I believe that this is a big reason why students have a higher awareness level. News can travel extremely fast when it’s on the internet. For perfect example, how many times have you searched on youtube a clip that you have heard someone talking about? I know that recently during the new season of American Idol, there was a try-out that everyone was talking about because it was so dreadful. It was called “pants on the ground”. The night it showed, I was busy doing homework. The next morning when I came to work, it was like I had missed the funniest thing of the century. As soon as I got home, I sat down on my computer and youtubed “pants on the ground”, and I found the video clip with already over 10,000 views. I bet after reading my blog, you will try to watch it. This is a silly example of how something travels so quickly, but this is also how news travels so quickly. I bet that thousands of people googled something about the earthquake in Haiti as soon as it happened. The internet is how the community is socially communicating these days. Technology is how we stay connected with the world.

The social community of Twitter and Facebook is a gigantic phenomenon that everyone has heard of. I believe my grandmother even has a Facebook account. “Tweeting” is socailly a way that connects students on college campuses. These connections come from either posting what social event they are heading to, what class they are sleeping through, or what exam they are stressed out for. Students might read these “tweets” and communicate with other students about having similar emotions or even having questions about assignments. The title of my blog is to give an example of how fast these online social networks are growing. I am younger graduate student, and I was not sure what Twitter was about a month ago. Within a month and all of my friends pressuring me to make an account, I have a twitter account and “tweet” almost every day. Technology spreads extremely fast and I believe it initiates a new level of understanding within the college classroom. Technology is the key to connecting students across campuses. These social networking communities are important for connecting the college student today.

During the past year, Facebook and Twitter has targeted an older generation of people. Like I said before my grandmother has a Facebook account along with my mother, my great aunt, and my college teachers. WHOA…..what? Teachers? Is there a community outside of the classroom that connects students with their teachers? It is definitely possible now with social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Read this article found on the Chronicle:

http://0-chronicle.com.umiss.lib.olemiss.edu/article/Facebook-The-New-Classroom/48575/

This article was written by a teacher discussing different experiences that she deals with having a Facebook account. She mentions the boundary that should be crossed between private and public postings with students. She discussed the possibility that she could see when a student is struggling with homework and was in a dilemma to help them or not. It was very interesting to me that some of the comments that the students said, “If we didn't want your help, we wouldn't have friended you in the first place”. This is a perfect example of how technology and the social networking online community can impact students on the college campuses today. With what we know about the virtual community, I think it is inevitable for future students to not be a part of a virtual community. Therefore technology is a key part to colleges today.

Technology doesn’t just include these social networking communities, but also online classes, iphone applications, labtops, e-mails, ipad, etc. In this generation of students, there is an endless list of technology devices that are seen within the college community. During classes, students are using “clickers” to answer test questions and quiz questions. Teachers used blackboard and other programs to display study material for their students online. There are discussion boards and blogs that involve interactions with students and students, and also with students and teachers. Technology is present in every type of class whether it is art, science, mathematics, or political systems. I think technology will be present in future generations whether you like it or not. So be ready.....