Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Hmmmm....

A former Prof of mine posted an article about this on her Facebook feed this morning and captioned it the same way I am. Hmmmmmmmm... basically, Missouri has passed a law which bans teachers from friending/talking to students on Facebook.

The aim of lawmakers (laudable if slightly misguided in this case) is to protect students from creepy inappropriate teachers that Facebook stalk students. I don't have hard data in front of me, but I'm willing to bet that there are a lot of inappropriate student-teacher relationships that never get reported- but then again, there's a lot of sexual abuse, rape and other horrible crimes that don't get reported either. Singling out teachers is fundamentally unfair and stigmatizing all of them as potential sex offenders is horrible.

A far better idea would be to have school districts produce policies for their employees on the use of social media and guidelines for proper, professional behavior when using it- this would at least mandate that schools have policies in place governing what's OK versus what's not OK and more to the point, would allow teachers to use the increasingly important realm of social media to connect with students and parents.

So while I'm glad that policymakers are taking a hard look at things like this, this law needs to be redirected towards making sure schools have standards of behavior in place for using social media rather that penalizing behavior that has yet to happen and might not even happen.

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