Final Exams and Office Hours

Final Exams will for all Glendale College classes will take place June 5-12. Every course at Glendale College has a designated final exam day and time. The days and times for Your Humble Blogger's MC101 classes are as follows...

Class: MW 9:10-10:35 AD217
Final: Wednesday, June 5, 9:10-11:30 am AD217

Class: MW 10:45-12:10 AD217
Final: Monday, June 10, 9:10 am-11:30 am AD217

Class: TTh 9:10-10:35 AD217
Final: Thursday, June 6, 9:10-11:30 am AD217

Class: TTh 10:45-12:10 CR234
Final: Thursday, June 6, 11:50 am-2:10 pm CR234

Another thing that changes during final exams are professors' office hours. Mine are as follows...

Wednesday, June 5, 8-9 am

Thursday, June 6, 8-9 am

Monday, June 10, 1-2 pm

Tuesday, June 11, 1-2 pm

In-Class Assignment for TTh Classes

The 9:10 and 10:45 TTh classes on May 30 will see a Stanford Law School video on the First Amendment and Hate Speech. Your Humble Blogger is considering this video as part of a lesson in future MC101 and MC105 (A new course titled Media, Gender, Race, and Class) classes. TTh students should answer the following questions for attendance credit...

•Is it possible or impossible to regulate hate speech while allowing the free expression necessary to maintain democracy? Which of the panelists' arguments have most influenced your answer?

•What parts of the video used terms or ideas that you found hard to understand? In the future, what should be defined for classes before they see the video?

•When the new MC105 (Media, Gender, Race, and Class) course is offered in 2020, is it something you would consider taking? It will transfer to CSU, UC and most private colleges and universities.

Forget This!

This is a Medianote Classic. It was originally presented to MC101 students in September 2015.

There is an amazingly unfortunate video of you going around the Internet. Should it be allowed to haunt you forever, or can search engines and social media sites be forced to take that video down. Large online companies like Google and Facebook are running into conflicts over the European idea of "The Right to be Forgotten." NPR reports.

Questions...

•In Germany, once a law-breaker has paid his or her debt to society, record of the criminal conviction is erased from the public record. What do you think of this concept?

•Should public figures (politicians, celebrities and other famous people) have the right to be forgotten, or should this only be for regular people?

•What other types of problems with content on their sites do multinational Internet companies run into?

•Should the right to be forgotten be extended to the U.S.?

•Are there any practical problems with "The Right to be Forgotten" on the Internet?

When Speech Isn't Really Speech

The following is a MediaNote Classic. It was originally presented to MC101 classes in May 2016.

Freedom of Speech is a huge idea expressed very briefly in the First Amendment. So it is up to courts to decide what Freedom of Speech means, especially as it relates to technologies The Founders couldn't have imagined. Computer code, for example. NPR reports.

Questions...

•Name some things that aren't really speech, but they are sort of similar to speech?

•When does government force you to say or pass along messages you'd rather not say or pass along.

•What would be the impact if government could force software developers to put in code they don't want to put in?

•Political money has considerable free speech protection. What problems does that cause for the political system?