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Iranian students are taking to the streets to protest the apparent theft of their country’s presidential election by hard-line incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Iran’s students overwhelmingly supported challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, and they are deeply distrustful of government results that show Ahmadinejad winning re-election in a landslide. In Tehran there are reports of police beating students with batons, and even of police and student demonstrators throwing rocks at one another.
It remains unclear what steps Mousavi will take next, and how the nation’s students will react as the situation develops — some believe that a meek response by Mousavi could further inflame student anger, creating further instability in the system.
More on this story as it develops.
3 pm update: It’s now midnight in Tehran. Very little solid news has emerged in the last few hours. There are reports that Iranian mobile phone service has been cut off, and that that internet access has been restricted or degraded. Time magazine has eyewitness reports of the fatal beating of a protester, and rumors that Mousavi has been placed under house arrest are circulating widely.
A San Jose State University computer science student has won a victory in a struggle over control of his academic work.
Kyle Brady was threatened with punishment by a professor for posting code he had written for a class assignment online. (Brady wanted to make his code available to other programmers, his prof thought that making it public would facilitate cheating among students who were given the same assignment in the future.) Brady appealed his prof’s decision, and the university took his side.
As Boing Boing’s Cory Doctorow says, this ruling affirms fundamental principles about the teacher/student relationship:
Profs — including me, at times — fall into the lazy trap of wanting to assign rotework that can be endlessly recycled as work for new students. But the convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience. … Students work harder when the work is meaningful, when it has value other than as a yardstick for measuring their comprehension.
That’s worth saying again, I think. “The convenience of profs must be secondary to the pedagogical value of the university experience.” Exactly.
Teenage students at a school in Loughton, England staged a boycott of one of their classes this spring when they discovered that the classroom it was held in had been fitted out with video cameras.
The students at Davenant Foundation School discovered the cameras when they arrived in class one Monday morning — they had not been consulted on, or even informed of, their installation. Seventeen of eighteen students in the class walked out.
It took school administrators two weeks to address the students’ concerns, saying that the cameras had been installed for teacher training purposes and would not be activated without prior notice to the class. Later, however, students discovered that microphones in the room had been turned on. (They turned them off.)
Last week two of the protesters, Lela Clancy and Sam Goodman, published an opinion piece on their protest, and the public response to it, in The Guardian, one of Britain’s leading newspapers. It’s well worth reading.
(via Boing Boing)
A study of forty thousand American college students finds that gays, lesbians, and bisexuals are more likely to place importance on political activism than straights, and that gay and bisexual men are more likely to be involved with student organizations. (LGB students were also more likely to value participation in the arts.)
The study, which was just published in the Economics of Education Review, is only available publicly as a pricey ($31.50) download. The above info is from the article’s abstract, and if I can get library access to it, I’ll bring you more details.
A reminder: My panel at the NYC Grassroots Media Conference is tomorrow at 2:45 pm at Hunter College.
Here’s the panel description:
Student activists are constantly struggling to build community, and new media offer powerful tools for making that happen. Our workshop will explore the role of activist-produced media in creating news, transforming existing narratives, and empowering students in the university and the larger society. The panel will consider the role of alternative and mainstream media in recent organizing at CUNY, NYU and the New School, examine how activists can make effective use of Facebook, Twitter and other social media tools, and illuminate how educators can bring activist-produced video into the classroom.
Our lineup is going to include folks talking about the use of blogs, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube in student organizing, and our presenters are a mix of undergrads, grad students, and others. It’s going to be a great session, and if you make it out, be sure to come say hi afterwards.
The whole conference is looking great, and it’s ridiculously cheap, so if you’re going to be in NYC tomorrow and you’re not already booked, you should be sure to stop by.
Saturday morning update: Conference tweeting is at the #nycgm hashtag. A photo of me is up here, if you’d like to say hi.
studentactivism.net 
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