The Next Step

I first joined Facebook a year-and-a-half ago as a way to try and connect with my students in a place they were already hanging out online.  I created a group for one of my courses and invited my students to join voluntarily.  A handful did and we ran some discussions and small projects from inside the network.  I wasn’t happy with the use for education and moved over to Ning, administrating (with my assistant principal) a much larger private network last school year.

I basically left Facebook alone for the last year, except when an occasional student would send me a message or a friend from the past would say hi.  Slowly more and more friends began to find me. Then about a month ago it seems like my little high school discovered FB, and we now have reunions happening on a daily basis. That’s a problem. I now have high school friends, college friends, employment friends, random FB friends, and former/present students of mine on FB.  Interestingly, the one group of my life not represented is my PLN.

The risk for something inappropriate (old pics, wall comments, etc) getting associated with my name started becoming a concern so I went back to FB to explore my privacy options.

I was contemplating just creating a separate identity for my high school students and redirecting them to that persona, but was happy to find that I could take care of my accessibility concerns through customizable privacy settings.

The first thing I did was go into Privacy and select Profile.  Since I am most concerned about the Wall feature and an old friend leaving an undesirable message in public, I just turned that off completely. If anyone wants to say hi, they can just as easily send a message.

Now in order to customize my privacy settings I had to create lists to separate people, basically: family, high school friends, college, colleagues, and students. To do that, just go to Friends, and on the right hand side you can select ‘make a new list.’ Add each of your friends to the appropriate list.

Once I created lists then I could determine who could see what throughout FB.  Since I didn’t want my students to see any videos or photos with my name, I just went into each of those categories and selected Customize, then excluded certain groups (note that I put family in the same exclusion category as students….haha):

Im pretty sure with these changes I’ve created an environment that allows students to still find me, to private message me, and to chat with me when they want but have eliminated the possibility of my personal life overflowing into my professional one.

This is the only network I belong to that has any students or non-professional friends on it so had to take extra precautions. What have you done on FB, or even Myspace, to ensure professional integrity?