Students as facebook friends: Too much, too close?

What's the harm? I innocently thought. Having a facebook group for the basic communication class I teach was a great idea (started by a student and now handed over to me and the GTAs for the class). It wasn't long before undergrads (first-year students) started adding me as a friend. Given the group we all belonged to it, I felt refusing to confirm students' friend requests would be a bit of a double-standard. Sure, I would be well within a traditional student-teacher relationship if I had refused, but it seemed a bit hypocritical to encourage them to use the technology to foster community among lecture students and then refuse to fully be a part of that community.

Needless to say, this is no longer a traditional student-teacher relationship, and refusing to confirm students' friend requests of me is not like refusing to give them my home or cell phone number. It's more like asking them to be part of a phone tree with me and then refusing to give them my phone number.

So, social networking technology like facebook (which I believe can be an effective teaching tool) has changed the student-teacher relationship. This isn't news. And others have theorized, speculated, and written about this change better than I can.

More specific for me, I now get news of their photo albums on my own facebook news feed. While none of these photos are of a...compromising nature, some come close. Some involve activities that could be illegal, and others just provide more information about the students than I'd like to know.

The students aren't to blame, although they should think about taking down some of these photos before embarking on a serious job hunt or be "found out" by potential employers doing the regular google-facebook-myspace search of applicants. No, I think it's just a matter of technology fostering unintended consequences in a more nontraditional teacher-student relationship.

Interestingly, I think the next step is to use these experiences of mine as teaching tools in the classroom, examples of the ways technology is both open and public (even when we think it's private or, at the least, harmless to our "online reputations"). I'll certainly include this little talk in my lesson plan for lectures to the basic oral communication class I teach.

So, all I can do now is grin and bear it...and not click on the pictures when the icons pop up in my news feed!