Education Association warns against social networking
Stephen Rahn recently shared this post by Ben Wildeboer on Google Reader. Apparently, the Ohio Education Association is advising its members to not join social networking sites such as MySpace or Facebook. And if members do belong to those sites, they advise removing them as soon as possible. According to eSchool News, the dangers they cite include the potential for students and teachers to interact inappropriately, and the chance that a student might create an imposter site and post inappropriate material on it.
Huh? Is the education association led by people who are so out of touch they don’t even know what their newest and youngest members are up to? Or am I being naive, and this a reasonable attempt for the OEA to protect its members? Most of the young teachers I’ve seen hired the last couple of years just use social networking as a way of life. They’ve grown up with e-mail and IM, and networking sites are just a natural extension of those tools. For my way of thinking, teachers who get caught up inappropriately in the lives of their students are going to try to do that, with or without MySpace. And if privacy is an issue, simply use the internal safety measures that those sites already have in place. For the record, I have both MySpace (for family and friends) and Facebook (for professional networks and blogging acquaintances).
Here is the full article from Ben: » Social networking sites pose “dangers” for educators? Sustainably Digital
Is the OEA burying its head in the sand on this one?
January 20th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
This is ridiculous. Personally, I don’t have a Facebook account and though I do have a MySpace account, I haven’t checked it in ages (there comes a time when the high spam-to-social-networking ratio gets to be a little too much). But you’re right in that teachers should be able to use these sites just like anyone else. NB: I wouldn’t mind if my teachers kept tabs on me. I doubt any of them would be interested enough to do so, but I don’t put anything too terribly private on the Internet.