knytestorme

In october 2009 the queensland department of education put in place a ban on teachers friending their students on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, citing increasing inappropriate behaviour by eight teachers in the previous financial year. When I read about this ban I was concerned since as I am looking at IT as my KLA and had considered that since I am online 24/7 it would make sense to open myself up to my students through all means, using the opportunity to help teach them about cybersafety with respect to social networking sites, instant messaging, chat relay etc.

Looking at it from an IT perspective, using these technologies would also allow students to ask questions or make comments about material in a semi-open forum which I could respond to when I have a free moment (which will likely still be faster than the student waiting until class hours to ask me, then having to go find an answer for them and getting back to them) while also taking advantage of various pedagological paradigms such as scafolding, small group learning and peer learning through other students responding to the queries before I get to them, for example.

With this idea in mind I decided to look at what others were thinking about whether or not students and teachers should be friends on social networking sites and what the potential risks, real and percieved, actually were given that the queensland ban came after only eight incidents in one year with no actual physical abuse reported while in the previous 3 years over 30 teachers had been actioned for offline incidents as reported here. The other really interesting thing was that a lot of the articles raised a point that I hadn’t considered initially and that is that it’s not just the students that have to be careful of the teachers, the teachers also have to worry about the potential for inappropriate behaviour by the students towards them and what it could mean in the longer term.

The first point that all of the articles agreed upon was that if a teacher decideds to friend current students on a social networking site there exists a potential for the teacher-student dynamic to shift in the classroom to the student seeing the teacher as more of a friend and treating them as such in front of others rather than maintaining the professional relationship expected in the classroom. This percieved familiarity by the student can come from them seeing details of a more personal nature, such as statsus updates, postings, photos or messages from others on the teachers page which they could then bring up in class as a way of undermining the teacher, seeming to be good friends with them, etc…this situation also has the potential to have other students in the class, who may not be friended or have access to these sites, percieving a bias from the teacher towards the friended students and causing issues in their own way.

Both Cheri Lucas and Blue Skunk make the point that it is realised teachers likely have a need to have a way to interact with students in an out-of-classroom manner that is similar to social networking sites but they are likely not the best methods to use. The reason for this is the distinction that they make between social networking and educational networking sites, pointing out that social networking sites are designed in such a way that thye likely won’t meet all the needs the teacher may have in the way an educational networking site will. They go on to both talk about the fact that a teacher who feels the need to interact with students this way should talk to the IT departments and administrators so as to get the best possible solution that will be secure, provide all the tools the teacher needs in the system and be carefully monitored for appropriateness in a way that social networking can’t be.

In terms of my KLA, all of these blogs raise valid reasons for the ban in queensland (and similar in states in the US and other countries) along with suggestions to help teachers find appropriate solutions to provide all the tools they need in a manner that all students can participate and have their activites and safety monitored but I still feel they are missing the point overall.

Yes, these solutions may work but can have issues such as:

• if they are too secured then it can take away the timeliness that instant messaging or facebook messages provide if the teacher can only log in from a computer at the school for instance
• we’re not using systems our students are already using and leveraging them in a way to make it easy for them to feel comfortable in the use
• we’re not teaching them how to safely use the tools they are currently using and thus opening them up to more potential mishaps

If we are worried about a teacher behaving inappropriatly with a student over these technologies then I would suggest that using tools such as facebook and myspace are more of a deterrant than an enabler. Parents of students are able to request to be friended by a teacher that friends their child for instance, and an abuser is a lot less likely to be inappropriate in a semi-open forum such as facebook where all their friends will see comments from them than they would be in one-to-one communication with the student through something like sms or instant messaging.

In the long-run, I see these bans and guidelines as hampering our ability to teach students with real-world examples and hand-on in the IT KLA and potentially exacerbating the problem rather than finding a real solution to it. I think most people would also take offense at the underlying statement that are implicit in the bans that anyone that wants to do something such as friend a student is doing so for nefarious means…if 8 teachers in the whole of the state is the extent of the recognised issue then tarring everyone with the same brush is not the way to go about things if you want to keep or attract teachers to the profession.