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Social networking has hit a snag.

Al's Morning Meeting reader David Studinski, editor in chief of The Ball State Daily News tells me:

The popular networking site Facebook released new features Tuesday. A "news feed" now exists on the home page of every user's account, allowing them to simply log-in and see every last detail of their social network. Who is dating who, who changed what in the profile, what friend is at what party. It's all there as a social circle RSS feed, if you will.

Students, however, are less than amused. Petitions and similar anti-Facebook groups have sprouted on Facebook's site itself. Here's a link to the largest petition. (You have to be a registered Facebook user to log in.)

I have to say that I'm astounded by the more than 284,000 [editor's note: as of 9:45 p.m. Wednesday night, 419,304 students had joined the group] students who have come together electronically against something they feel violates their privacy -- even if it is on their own doing. As Facebook points out, the information here is nothing new, it's just the way it's being presented that is angering students.

Our coverage is at bsudailynews.com. Check out the story for some interesting statistics on how fast this petition grew online within a matter of two or three hours.

C/Net also is covering the story. So is Wired News. The San Francisco Chronicle's tech blog included an item about it yesterday, too.

Time magazine has an explanation of why students are so angry. Time says:

On Tuesday morning the popular social networking site unrolled a new feature dubbed the "News Feed" that allows users to track their friends' Facebook movements by the minute. For many of Facebook's 8-million-plus student users, it was too much. Within 24 hours, hundreds of thousands of students nationwide organized themselves to protest the new feature. Ironically, they're using Facebook to do it.

The feature in question appears on the user's home page and looks like a glitzy laundry list. It chronicles every action a user's friends have recently taken on Facebook. These include the mundane: Sally befriended Joan, the boring: Tim now likes The Daily Show, and the juicy: John and Beth broke up. And it case it matters, each action is time-stamped to the minute.

By its nature, News Feed is intrusive and that's what upsets students. It's one thing to casually check out a friend's updated profile between classes. It's another to be unwillingly inundated with each friend's latest Facebook antics. The News Feed does not have an off switch, although users can block or limit non-friends from seeing their profiles, which feed directly into the News Feed. At the very least, the aggrieved students want the option of a News Feed off-switch. Some want Facebook to do away with it completely.  

Forbes has an interesting article on the advertising side of this venture -- and the new look of the site.

Pressuring First-Graders

Our kids in Florida have been in school for three weeks now, but for many of you, the school year begins this week. There is a story awaiting you behind the doors of the first-grade classroom. Newsweek finds that, increasingly, finger-painting and fun have given way to standardized tests and endless math worksheets. First-graders are ending up in summer school, and an increasing number are even failing the first grade.

The story says that, in some wealthier neighborhoods, parents are holding their kids out of kindergarten for a year so they will be more advanced by having another year of preschool under their belts. When the kids, now 6 years old, hit the school doors, they will have a jump-start on their classmates. It's similar to the sports practice known as red-shirting. Tutoring companies are now willing to teach three-year-olds how to read. Sylvan Learning Center just opened a "Junior" division.  Newsweek says:

In the last decade, the earliest years of schooling have become less like a trip to "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and more like SAT prep. Thirty years ago first grade was for learning how to read. Now, reading lessons start in kindergarten and kids who don't crack the code by the middle of the first grade get extra help. Instead of story time, finger painting, tracing letters and snack, first graders are spending hours doing math work sheets and sounding out words in reading groups. In some places, recess, music, art and even social studies are being replaced by writing exercises and spelling quizzes. Kids as young as 6 are tested, and tested again -- some every 10 days or so -- to ensure they're making sufficient progress. After school, there's homework, and for some, educational videos, more workbooks and tutoring, to help give them an edge.

Not every school, or every district, embraces this new work ethic, and in those that do, many kids are thriving. But some children are getting their first taste of failure before they learn to tie their shoes. Being held back a grade was once relatively rare: it makes kids feel singled out and, in some cases, humiliated. These days, the number of kids repeating a grade, especially in urban school districts, has jumped. In Buffalo, N.Y., the district sent a group of more than 600 low-performing first graders to mandatory summer school; even so, 42 percent of them have to repeat the grade. Among affluent families, the pressure to succeed at younger and younger ages is an inevitable byproduct of an increasingly competitive world. The same parents who played Mozart to their kids in utero are willing to spend big bucks to make sure their 5-year-olds don't stray off course.

Some more resources:

• "Academic Redshirting and Young Children," U.S. Department of Education (2000)
• "Academic Redshirting," Clearinghouse on Early Education and Parenting, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (updated March 2005)
• "Parents Debate Redshirting," Orange County (Calif.) Register (Sept. 4, 2006)
• "'Redshirting' Kindergartners," KFOR-TV, Oklahoma City, Okla. (July 14, 2006)
• "The Pros and Cons of 'Holding Out,'" Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin (summer 2005)
  

Side note: While we at Poynter are celebrating our colleague Roy Peter Clark's new (and, might I say, excellent) book, "Fifty Writing Tools," I recommend one of his older works for parents and teachers of young writers. "Free to Write" is one book I use often when working with young writers, including my own kids. I thought of "Free to Write" while reading the Newsweek story and wondered how many kids would find writing so stressful if more adults knew how to teach writing in the compassionate and interactive way Roy Clark recommends.

Horse-Slaughter Bill Comes Up Today

The Rural Blog says:

A vote on whether commercial horse slaughter will be allowed to continue in the U.S. is scheduled for today in the House, and the Humane Society of the United States says at least 250 representatives favor the measure -- far more than the 218 votes it needs to pass the chamber.

The Dallas Morning News reports that the meat of about 90,000 horses was processed in at least three U.S. slaughterhouses last year, and was sold to foreign buyers.

Here is a background piece I wrote on Al's Morning Meeting in July.  

Timeshare Hell

The (Charleston, S.C.) Post and Courier recently investigated problems with time-share condos. The paper reports:

Much of the industry is now a well-oiled machine that often nicks consumers at every level of purchasing, owning and getting rid of a time share. Unsuspecting buyers face:

• High-pressure sales tactics

• Expensive financing

• Convoluted reservation systems

• Volatile and steep annual fees and questionable management

• A dismal resale market in which owners virtually must give away their units in order to get rid of them.

The investigation gives some insight:

Reservation or no reservation, time share owners get billed regularly, coughing up fees to pay for maintenance and occasional refurbishments. These charges generally run between $150 and $1,000 a year and can add up to the original sales price of a unit over 10 or 15 years.

A lot of buyers fall behind on these payments. In 2004, the average week of time share ownership cost $479 in annual maintenance fees, according to an industry trade group. The March study by PricewaterhouseCoopers said some 7.4 percent of time share owners were delinquent in paying those fees.

In addition to sales revenue and high-interest loans, many developers collect a steady stream of recurring fees by managing the resorts that they built, a practice that has sparked criticism. Their employees often dominate the ownership committees that set the annual charges and hire contractors. Some publicly traded time share companies highlight these arrangements in filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Byron Wiegand, a former time share developer who owns California-based Timeshare Resale Alliance, said this is a "total conflict of interest" that is gouging consumers.

"You've got the weasel in charge of the henhouse," he said. "And they're just fee-ing them to death ... stuffing the money in their pockets as fast as they can."

Individual buyers own such a miniscule portion of a resort that they often don't bother exercising their voting rights. Once developers are in charge, Wiegand said, problems often start. Fees go up, maintenance is neglected and one-time "assessment" charges are levied.

Time shares, like most cars, immediately plummet on the resale market. That's one of the reasons banks won't finance them directly.

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