K-12 Teachers Discouraged from Using Social Networking

By Daniel Miessler on February 20th, 2009: Tagged as Culture | Social Networking

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I heard recently on NPR that public school teachers all over the country are being discouraged from using social networking sites like Facebook. Many are actually prohibited from doing so with punishments being as severe as immediate termination.

I find this very strange.

Social networking isn’t some sort of fringe behavior that you can prohibit teachers from engaging in. I get the fact that students are supposed to see their teachers as authority figures, and not as “regular people”, and I also get that teachers often have lives outside of work that might not be something to set an example by. But these things are tiny in importance compared to the freedom of the teachers.

You can’t limit teachers from expressing themselves via a medium that’s going to be as normal as the mobile phone in a few years. There are other solutions. For one, it’s possible to maintain granular control over who you share various types of content with on these types of networks. So teachers could, in all fairness, be required to limit their more sensitive content to friends only (and hence, not students).

This is a fair compromise.

At that point schools could scan their teachers’ profiles and make sure there’s no images of naked drinking binges available to the public that that teachers’ students could see. But to fire a teacher for just having a Facebook account at all is demonstrative of how clueless people still are regarding the impact that social networking is going to have on society.

These types of networks aren’t going away, and everyone is going to be on them. We need to be figuring out ways to manage this fact rather than run around trying to take the pee out of the pool. ::

  • http://brooksgarrett.com brooksgarrett

    Interesting you picked this topic up… What you are describing is actually not a problem, but rather a symptom of a much larger underlying issue. To summarize:

    Zero Tolerance == Zero Intelligence

    I'm more interested in what drives school administrators to view all subjects in strictly black and white colors. You mention the use of granular controls, which as an IT person makes sense. For some reason however, school administrators by and large don't believe in “granular”; they favor macro “OH MY GOD KILL IT ALL!”

    For example, reference the kid in Kansas who very recently was expelled for having a knife at school. A steak knife. That was in her lunch box. That had chicken breast in it. And did I mention this expelled denizen was a Straight A student who was on the Model U.N.?

    I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

  • http://maxolasersquad.com/ Maxolasersquad

    My wife, who is a teacher, canceled her MySpace account because of concerns of students finding her page. Later she started useing Facebook because she has much better control over who has access to view her page.

  • http://maxolasersquad.com/ Maxolasersquad

    I thought I should add she did this of her own accord, not because of anything administration told her.

  • http://cooperati.net TIMM

    this is one step away from secondary association qualifiers for hiring or firing, and someday i might be required to relinquish my account for my sister to have her job.

    ultimately, it used as a bargaining tool for school district managers in their negotiations with teacher's unions.

    indeed, zero tolerance has brought us such marvels such as hugging and kissing between students being equated as rape, branding students sex offenders. children have to go off campus to take aspirin, but can confide in teacher's and principles to get abortions without parental notice. better not point your finger at the wrong student, since he can say you said it was a gun, immediate cause for expulsion. in this last few weeks, an ROTC Marine color guard was expelled for having the non-functioning mock-rifle in the back seat of her car.

    the list goes on, and it's not for the sake of safety. the trend has obviously indicated a compulsive drive towards draconian control over all aspects of the academic institution, from the top to the bottom and everywhere they can infect their “causes”.

    -=T=-

  • cooperati

    this is one step away from secondary association qualifiers for hiring or firing, and someday i might be required to relinquish my account for my sister to have her job.

    ultimately, it used as a bargaining tool for school district managers in their negotiations with teacher's unions.

    indeed, zero tolerance has brought us such marvels such as hugging and kissing between students being equated as rape, branding students sex offenders. children have to go off campus to take aspirin, but can confide in teacher's and principles to get abortions without parental notice. better not point your finger at the wrong student, since he can say you said it was a gun, immediate cause for expulsion. in this last few weeks, an ROTC Marine color guard was expelled for having the non-functioning mock-rifle in the back seat of her car.

    the list goes on, and it's not for the sake of safety. the trend has obviously indicated a compulsive drive towards draconian control over all aspects of the academic institution, from the top to the bottom and everywhere they can infect their “causes”.

    -=T=-

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