In the last few weeks the whole idea of whether a teacher should become friends of students on Facebook surfaced all around me; this is partially my fault since I’m teaching graph theory using my Facebook network as an example and motivation. There’s a bunch of articles and blog posts about the topic online already (the best one, I think, is here, and here’s a more conservative one), but since so few people mentioned in the articles use Facebook the way I do, I thought I’d chime in.

There are usually two ways schools deal with any kind of technology that is too big to ignore: embrace it, or control it. I’ve chosen to embrace Facebook as soon as it was possible for me to sign up years ago. As a teacher, I embrace it so hard I may as well be giving Facebook a bear hug.

Who Do I “Friend”?

I only have one rule when it comes to accepting Facebook friend requests: if I know you in any legitimate context, I will accept you as a Facebook friend. So my Facebook friends list is populated not only by friends and family but also colleagues, folks I’ve danced with a few times, people I’ve met at conferences, kids who were at a talk I gave, old classmates, people I’ve gone on one blind date with, former students and, yes, the dreaded Current Student. The converse is also true: if I don’t know who you are and why I should know you, you will be ignored.

Currently I have 460 friends on Facebook, about 20 of whom are current students and maybe 50 to 75 are former students. (There may be more—it is hard to find that information quickly on Facebook.) The number of current colleagues is also in the teens.

Privacy and Profile Contents

Security-wise, I do put all current students on a “limited profile” list. This means almost nothing as the only things that they cannot do is to see my Instant Messenger username, my address, my home phone number, my cell phone number and the address of my web site. This is, of course, completely pointless. My web site is the first result on a Google search of my name; my instant messenger username is my name without any spaces (once I transition to that account completely); my address and home phone number are public information since I live on campus and students can easily access a campus phone directory; my cell phone number was leaked to my students even before I put it on my Facebook account.

In fact, I have several students who can access all that information on my profile anyway because they are students who I leave in charge of certain events and they sometimes need to reach me at a moment’s notice.

But the point here is that anything I put on my profile is either a blindingly obvious fact about me or something that you can find with one quick Google search. My CV, for example, is on my web site and contains much of the same information as my Facebook profile. And if you know me for some decent period of time and you can’t figure out that I’m a cat person and I like American folk dances, well, maybe you don’t actually know me. Of course, you can always Google for my blog and read about these facts right on the top of the sidebar.

I’ve actually been hiding something: my current students cannot see photos tagged of me and they cannot read my status updates. However, since my status updates are tied to Twitter (and my Twitter username is just my name; not that it matters since I link to it from my web page) and all the photos tagged with my name are PG or taken by my students, or available on Flickr, this is, once again, a pointless piece of security against people who are willing to dig.

Facebook as Facebook vs. Content Platform

I guess when it comes to Facebook I’m “old school”. That is, I think of Facebook as a facebook: a document that contains names, photographs of the people whose names are listed, and ways of contacting them. That’s what Facebook was when I first joined it and that’s why I wanted to join it. I want a way to access contact information for other people and I want other people to be able to contact me. It’s much better than getting a listing in the Yellow Pages because I use the Internet and not the Yellow Pages to look up people and so do people who want to contact me. So it makes perfect sense to have students and former students be my friends on Facebook: now they can see my contact information! Except, unlike the school directory, they’ll actually use this thing!

Back in 2006, I actually advertised my Facebook profile on a syllabus for a class I TAed. The end result was that three people from that class became my “friends” and that they actually contacted me about class-related things while most other students didn’t. Once again: they don’t read the course web page, but they use Facebook. I probably should encourage them to use the course web page, but I rather they remember to ask me when the test is and show up instead of just ignoring everything.

As Facebook evolved, it became a sharing, blogging, discussing kind of site. I was faced with a question: should I abandon my students as friends on Facebook so that I don’t have to deal with students finding content I have created? The answer was, of course, no: I’ve already been posting content under my real name on the Internet for years and making them available to the public. Why hide from a specific subset of the population now?

Sticky Issues

The most important thing about being friends with students on Facebook is that I never take the initiative. If they want me to see all their updates they are free to do so. I don’t actively look for photographs of my students or anything, but they do appear just because Facebook aggregates all the content it can and shoves it in my face. A large number of my students are aware that I accept friend requests from students but they also know that if the second they send the request they lose privacy, and so they do not send one.

As to what to put and what not to put up on Facebook in terms of content it’s pretty much a no-brainer. Most importantly, I don’t post pictures of students up, no matter how funny it is. In fact, I rarely post pictures that aren’t my profile pictures up on Facebook. I know someone who decided to put headshots of his entire class of middle school students up on a semi-public Facebook album along with their first and last names. That is possibly the worst thing someone can do to violate student privacy. Don’t do that. Even if I was your boss, I’d fire you for that despite how much I love freedom of information and expression.

There is a large temptation to use Facebook to communicate with students. In some sense, Facebook communication is unavoidable. They can go without checking their school e-mail account for days but you know they meticulously comb over Facebook messages every chance they get. However, I much prefer school e-mail for accountability and privacy issues. For very minor emergencies or very severe cases of “I need to get in touch with you now and I know you’re ignoring me”, I do use Facebook. This has happened twice so far. A commenter on this article wrote that if something like this was to happen the teacher should contact the students’ parents. That may be true, but in a boarding school or college setting parents usually have an even harder time contacting the student.

Drawbacks and Unexpected Outcomes

The biggest drawback of my open Facebook policy is that students tend to contact me on Facebook instead of through e-mail. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. However, regular e-mail has the advantage that everything is stored and sorted on a server; okay, really, it’s the sorted part that’s important this time around. Also, communication on Facebook seems to be more informal for a lot of people—I don’t really understand since I try to use proper sentences unless time is exceptionally pressing—and I rarely check my Facebook inbox. However, kids do learn and they eventually e-mail me when they realize that it takes me a few days before I notice that I have a new Facebook message.

One really awesome side effect of having my students as Facebook friends is that I can tell that they are sometimes interesting, thoughtful people. It’s nice to see flurries of status updates and comments whenever a large news item gets posted or when someone gets into college or when someone makes a piece of nice artwork. The status updates aren’t just about drama or homework or “stupid teenage things”, but sometimes they are about Danfur or urging people to donate to a cause or just simple excitement because something cool happened.

And maybe I should count myself lucky that I’ve not seen anything I didn’t want to see on Facebook yet.

Wing :: Apr.08.2009 :: Posts :: 3 Comments »