Blurry lines on Facebook are all too common now. I have now had several instances where I had to stop and really think before I accepted a friend request or posted something to Facebook. I work at a school with 5-12 year olds during the summer. This past summer we added some of our previous students as “junior counselors”. This meant that all of our helpers for the summer were technically old enough to be on Facebook. One girl, whom I’ve known since she was 5, wanted to friend me on Facebook. The hard part about this decision was that we had only ever had a student-teacher kind of relationship. I do not have anything bad on my Facebook that I mind her seeing, but I did not know if it crossed the line. It was strange to see that there were several other teachers at the school who had accepted her friend request, but still there were others that said that it crossed the line of an appropriate relationship with a student. I finally accepted her friend request but made it limited in the security settings.
It is interesting to see all the new controversies and things you have to think about when new technology and new media come out. I found one news article on this exact controversy. It was so popular that a New York news station picked up the story of what was happening in Utah. The school board in Utah was actually trying to ban student-teacher friendships on Facebook. The other interesting part of this news story was that it ended with them asking their viewers to contribute to a poll on the issue. News commenting on new media using new media…. O the world we live in…
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