Avenir said he joined the Facebook group last fall to get help with some of the questions the professor would give students to do online. As the network grew, he took over as its administrator, which is why he believes he alone has been charged.

“So we each would be given chemistry questions and if we were having trouble, we’d post the question and say: `Does anyone get how to do this one? I didn’t get it right and I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.’ Exactly what we would say to each other if we were sitting in the Dungeon,” said Avenir yesterday.

Why online collaboration is cheating and talking to colleagues after class, at home or in groups is not? He rightly says

“if this kind of help is cheating, then so is tutoring and all the mentoring programs the university runs and the discussions we do in tutorials,” he said.

I think the university authorities are exaggerating their reaction. They should check if Avenir has used the information taken from Facebook unfairly, that is, if he used any of its members’ ideas directly in his homework, in brief, if he plagiarized or properly cheated. University authorities are just taking an unfair shortcut to the problem, if they do sincerely believe Avenir has behaved unlawfully, they should prove so. Sharing knowledge should not be penalized, but encouraged, this the best way of learning.

The poor kid, clearly too much influenced by this social network, which seems to monopolize his life, is mentally tortured on camera by those three adolescents. You really feel sorry for him and also for his brother and friends, which seem not to see how bad they look on camera, abusing the kid and his problem.