Yik Yak has returned — and so have reports of cyberbullying, students say; The Record by Recorded Future, February 18, 2022

Emma Vail , The Record by Recorded Future; Yik Yak has returned — and so have reports of cyberbullying, students say

"Yik Yak, an anonymous social media app that was shuttered in 2017 after coming under fire for facilitating cyberbullying, was resurrected last year with an emphasis on new protective measures including anti-bullying guardrails. But students and watchdog groups are already reporting instances of abuse, and say that the new safeguards aren’t enough to stop people from using the app for cyberbullying. 

The app’s targeted consumers are college and high school students, allowing users to post or ‘Yak’ anonymously to others within a 5-mile radius. First launched in 2013 by Furman University students Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington, the app experienced a rollercoaster of initial success followed by sharp criticism that would lead to its demise in 2017. 

Advertised to be a safer and welcoming space, the app relaunched in August of 2021. New measures were put in place to ensure user safety including a downvote system. Posts that get 5 downvotes by other users are immediately removed from the platform. Yik Yak has implemented a one-strike-and-you’re-out policy that will ban the user from the app if the “violation is serious,” as stated on the website."

MIA Ethics Bowl Team Best in State; Coastal Breeze News, April 12, 2018

Barry Gwinn, Coastal Breeze News; MIA Ethics Bowl Team Best in State

"Ground zero for this change at MIA is the Ethics Bowl Team, a little known group who have been immersed in ethical issues for the past three years. On January 27, the current team won the Florida State Ethics Bowl championship and will get a shot at a national championship, beginning on April 20 at Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The issues they discuss are provided by the National High School Ethics Bowl (NHSEB), headquartered on the campus of the University of North Carolina. The NHSEB oversees both regional and national competitions.

Mentoring and coaching the MIA team is math teacher, Chris Liebhart, who doubles as head baseball coach and assistant coach on three other varsity teams at the school...

For the national championships, the NHSEB had provided them with 16 case studies which were laid out like a law school hornbook, complete with references and case citations. The topics ranged from the Electoral College, Confederate monuments, male circumcision, and eminent domain, to dating on Tinder. The team would have to be prepared to discuss eight of these cases, but would not know in advance which ones they would draw." 

How to Teach High-School Students to Spot Fake News; Slate, 12/21/16

Chris Berdik, Slate; How to Teach High-School Students to Spot Fake News:

"The exercise was part of “Civic Online Reasoning,” a series of news-literacy lessons being developed by Stanford University researchers and piloted by teachers at a few dozen schools. The Stanford initiative launched in 2015, joining a handful of recent efforts to help students contend with misinformation and fake news online—a problem as old as dial-up modems but now supercharged by social media and partisan news bubbles. The backers of these efforts warn that despite young people’s reputation as “digital natives,” they are woefully unprepared to sort online fact from fiction, and the danger isn’t just to scholarship but to citizenship...

Kahne plans to study news-literacy efforts to discover what specific strategies get young people to value facts, whether they bolster their existing beliefs or contradict them. For now, one popular suggestion by news-literacy educators is to tap teenagers’ instinctive aversion to people telling them what to think.

“One of the messages we’ve tried to stress more and more lately with the rise of fake news is this: Do you want to be fooled?” said Jonathan Anzalone, assistant director of the Center for News Literacy. “Wouldn’t you rather make up your own mind?”"

Have I Got a Play for You; Slate, 11/25/16

Jordana Williams, Slate; Have I Got a Play for You:

"Flipping now through our patchwork golem of a script, aghast, I estimate that 80 percent of what we performed actually appears in the original Company. We left lengthy passages essentially unaltered, but fully rewrote others. Even when the lines and lyrics were unchanged, we took subtler liberties, like converting “Being Alive,” Bobby’s solo meditation on loneliness and longing, into a full company number featuring three-part harmony...

So, where were the grown-ups when all of this was happening? Why didn’t they stop us, or at least advise us that our violations of copyright ranged from artistically disastrous to legally actionable? Now that I have kids of my own, I can guess why they stepped back and let us go hog wild. They knew we’d have the rest of our lives to question and edit ourselves (and acquire permission before monkeying with someone else’s art). The heedlessness we displayed would be repellent in an adult, but is arguably kind of awesome in a bunch of kids.

My son is working on his first musical, the soon-to-be smash hit Army Chickens. He’s a very practical boy, so early on, he came to my husband and me with a bunch of questions about budgets and ticket prices and actor pay and set construction needs. “No!” I shouted, probably too vehemently. “Just write the thing however you like.” And why not? He’ll never know what his wildest dreams are if he doesn’t start out as if nothing is impossible."