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This Blog is NOT Private
April 30, 2008
If you have any lingering hopes in your mind that what you do online as librarians at home will somehow remain private and disconnected with your work, get over it. As I noted in a School Library Journal column last year, there is no privacy in this interconnected social web we are using. This means
there are really great reasons not to blog! Even if you try and keep your activities anonymous, there is a really good chance that your Facebook profile, MySpace page, blog, and other online activities will be connected back to you.
Of course, the chance of less well-reasoned online behavior being connected back to you as a teacher becomes absurdly close to certain if you actually publish your full name and school where you work on your profile. As some teachers in the Washington, DC metro area recently discovered, stories about inappropriate online behavior
make for great reading in the Washington Post.
As one teacher noted in defending her proud assertions of wild behavior, "I never thought about parents and kids [seeing it] before. That's all I'm going to say." [
WP] One cannot help but wonder why it didn't occur to the teacher, though the very school where she is working may be to blame. I have long asserted that
one of the real problems with schools blocking social networking software is that it removes the opportunity for instruction.
We need to make sure that we are continuing to find opportunities to discuss positive and appropriate uses of social networking. For example, library schools could encourage students to tone down their public use of Facebook or MySpace and instead switch over to the professionally oriented
LinkedIn for their public persona. With a focus on employment and professional connections,
LinkedIn can meet the needs for social networking in an environment that is more obviously designed to ensure professional behavior. Because of this, I have no qualms about sharing my own LinkedIn profile. This isn't about removing social connections, but about recognizing that librarians and teacher are public figures who must meet a higher standard.
Posted by Chris Harris on April 30, 2008 | Comments (0)
