The Great Facebook Debate

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2009/09/08/bc-north-vancouver-facebook-teachers-guidelines-students.html

I don't know if anyone else has bumped into this article, but it deals with facebook in the classroom and how it should and shouldn't be used. Reading through I found many of the points to be quite valid and in a lot of ways common sense. The interviewer and interviewee basically talk about how teachers and student should not add each other as friends in facebook (big surprise huh), but instead if they choose to use it should create profiles dedicated specifically for school uses. Another interesting thing in the article, actually mentions that it is school board policy in the Vancouver and Langley school districts which bans teachers from adding students as facebook friends- something that I'm sure is going to become more and more prevalent in boards across the country as time goes on.

Despite the obvious risks and personal boundary crosses associated with student/teacher facebook communication, I still see facebook as a powerful academic tool. If dedicated pages and accounts are created for academic purposes, I think a lot of useful information exchange can happen if used properly. In university for instance (which I know is completely different from high school), one of my profs used facebook as a means of passing on important dates, and other information to us in class. In many ways this worked great, the information got out to us really fast, and we were able to comment on it, suggest new dates, ideas and all sorts of stuff in a really efficient manner. Granted none of us bothered to create specific academic profiles, which I'm sure we wouldn't have check as often as our regular profiles, but in theory I think it can be used as a really great teaching tool- again if used properly.