Sweet Dreams
I am hearing the song Sweet Dreams covered by my grade 9 students on our recent trips. I think they were covering the Marilyn Manson (scary) version. He was covering the original Eurythmics version.
In our readings for class, I came across an article from the Washington Post about teachers and social networking sites. I’m one of those teachers. Here is an article on the topic from NEA. What is my online responsibility as a teacher?
I have to admit: I am hyper-careful with my social networking presence. At the first hint of anything inappropriate, I delete without thought. But, I have to ask myself, is that how I want to live my life? In general, I want to be out there in the social networking world to keep up with friends. I have found a unique side motivation: to model good online behavior for my students.
But, there are some days (like today) when that is not so easy. I want to come home and broadcast to the world this thing that I have to say. I want to be sarcastic, derogatory, ironic and vulgar. I want my words to sting the page. I want my social network to ask me why. I want the cathartic freedom of flaming in cyberspace- but, wait, I’m a teacher.
As a teacher I realize that I only feel this way because I do not have the immediate social feedback that I would have if I would be venting in a circle of colleagues. As a teacher I know that the barrage of insults and accusations that I would feel compelled to post would not be professional, nor would they be productive in affecting change.
As a teacher in the social networking frontier, do you need to be on your best behavior? Should you model the “right” behaviors online all of the time? Or, do you get to shed your teacher facade every once in a while and just be human?
June 19th, 2008 at 08:00
These are awesome questions. They really get to the heart of what’s so powerful about Web 2.0 applications and our responsibilities as teachers. Hopefully through our work in this course and our continued forays into the blogosphere we will become more comfortable with the answers we develop.
You mentioned the lack of the the immediate social feedback of colleagues that we would receive in a face-to-face setting. Having this in mind seems like a good place start. Thanks for you post!