I read the following article the other day and I thought it might be an interesting and amusing follow-up to my previous post dealing with emojis and their use in the classroom.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Lawyers Faced With Emojis and Emoticons Are All ¯\\(ツ)\/¯

Apparently, over the past 10 years, the number of legal cases involving emoticons and emojis has been steadily rising and has jumped significantly in the last two.  In 2017, there were at least 33 court decisions that mentioned the little guys, up from 25 in 2016 and 14 in 2015.

One case mentioned in the article that hits rather close to home was a defamation case here in Michigan.  According to writer Mike Cherney, in this case, “the meaning of an emoticon, an emoji-like image created with text characters from a standard keyboard, was up for debate. A comment on an internet message board appeared to accuse a local official of corruption. The comment was followed by a “:P” emoticon.

The judges on the Michigan Court of Appeals concluded in 2014 that the emoticon ‘is used to represent a face with its tongue sticking out to denote a joke or sarcasm.’ The court said the comment couldn’t be taken seriously or viewed as defamatory.”

Lesson: if you’re being rude to someone, “:P” is the new “bless their heart.”

Lawyers are coming up more and more against emojis and emoticons, the meaning of which have real legal consequences for the parties involved.  To help deal with this new and growing issue, lawyers have put together seminars, held informal meetings and courses, and done research studies on the topic of emojis and emoticons.

“Emoji Law 101” – coming soon to Harvard Law School (probably)!

One thing that I am trying to do differently this semester as opposed to last semester is to establish high expectations earlier.  Last semester I fell like I gave more leeway on early assignments without inviting students to meet higher levels of effort and deeper levels of thought, at least not explicitly enough to be helpful.  Which resulted in some issues further along in the course (obviously).

While I still think that greater leeway should be afforded to students as they learn a new system and get used to the level of work expected of them in a new course, it’s important to make expectations for future work clear and, if appropriate, inviting students to rework and resubmit early assignments to conform with those expectations.

A recent example comes to mind that occurred in my English 10 course.  In completing the introductory discussion post and classmate response, one student elected to give a single sentence answer in his self-introductory post and single word answers (Hi!) in his responses to classmates.  While he technically completed each part of the assignment brief, it was clearly not a thoughtful, engaged response, and did not meet the standards and expectations I have for my students.  I was also concerned that, in a writing class especially, if this lack of thought and detail went unaddressed, it might show up later in larger writing assignments when it would be more difficult to course-correct.

My public response to the student on the discussion board was as follows:

“Hi, [Name]!  Welcome to class!

What are some of the hobbies that you most enjoy?  Do you participate in any extra-curriculars at your school?  What are you looking forward to in this class?”

Here I prompted for the information that should have been included in the original post without overtly correcting him in front of peers.  When creating a more private comment, however, I could be a little more straightforward:

“Thanks, [Name]!  I’m excited to have you in class this semester! However, I’d like to know a little more about you than you’ve shared here.  I think that it’s important that you know right off the bat that I expect high levels of thought, detail, and effort from my students.  I can’t give you full marks for your work on this assignment yet, but you are welcome to edit your posts or reply to them and give us some more information on yourself, and give more thoughtful responses to your classmates!  If you’re unsure about how to do that, or about what type of information/response I’m looking for here, shoot me a message/email/text and I’d be happy to help!  I’m rooting for you!”

I think the trick is keeping a positive tone while at the same time making it clear what you need from them and what your expectations are.  In my experience, both in the past and so far this semester, students respond very well to this mix of firmness, expectation, positivity, and availability.