One of the things that I’ve been telling people when they ask me about how useful social networking might be in terms of it’s use in/within academia is that instructors have to be careful not to get too close to their students. This is a general rule and often part of the code of conduct in a face to face environment, but when it comes to the online realm, many notions of proximity blur. Social networking certainly isn’t helping this and an instructor who has students as friends in Facebook open themselves up to scrutiny by their students. This could be good, showing students that instructors are real people as well, or bad with students using personal contact information or details against the instructor, or more likely the students aren’t really going to care. Afterall, how close are most of us to “facebook freinds” that we don’t see in real life anyway? We might post a happy birthday message once a year, but beyond that? Of course the good and the bad can be mitigated by the use of limited profiles (I really wish that Facebook would do like Flickr and have more than one level for their contacts).
But without that education, instructors and students might be heading down a dark road in terms of how to interact online (especially in the k-12 environment). So on campus here, I’m starting to try to develop some guides for instructors and students as to how to make the most of this great tool.
Now here is the catch, even though students want to have more interaction with their instructors online and more classes online (ASTD, Gateway), they don’t seem to want those people in their social space. So it seems that my warnings are well founded.
I’ll let you know how all this turns out.
Leave a Reply