Keeping Students Safe

Dennen’s draft article provided a clear list of issues and solutions for the use of social media in the classroom. The passage on safety, particularly in the K-12 setting, made me wonder if I would have used social media when I was a high school health teacher. I don’t think I ever would have beyond it being used as a research tool. I do not think the school board would have supported me friending any of my students nor would they have been comfortable with a private group for the class. I did consider creating a FB group at one point, but I quickly realized how bad that could turn out for me. I would have to have had the approval of the administration so that at least one of them would have access to the account to monitor what was being discussed. Seeking this approval would have likely got the idea shut down, but going behind their backs would have posed even bigger problems had a complaint or issue come out of the group. I did ask students to use their own devices from time to time. Our administration encouraged us to make the student’s constant engagement with their phones to our advantage. I remember three lessons that they used their cell phones to look up information. Once was to find athletes who had suffered from a mental disorder, once to find athletes who had suffered abuse and a last time to explore the Truth.com website (an anti-cigarette use organization). Thinking back on it, this had the potential to cause them issues at home if their parents monitored their phone usage. It may have caused concern or been deemed inappropriate by their parents, depending on the content of the website. Not only did I have to be aware of the data usage students were incurring, I also had to do my best to make sure they were not on any sites with material that was beyond the appropriate and necessary level of the topic at hand. A simple search for sexual abuse in sport can bring up some sites that are not appropriate for the school setting or children. If the wifi had consistently worked in our classroom, the data issue would be nonexistent and a large number of the inappropriate sites would be blocked by the network. However, there were times when the wifi was working and it blocked websites that I had asked the students to access or websites that I needed to access for my lessons. Often times, YouTube would be blocked, so I would have to download videos on my home network to show them in class. While reading this article, I thought of another example of context collapse that I am sure must be an issue very frequently experienced by students living in the dorms. The school’s Wifi network is available to students living in the dorms and is used by them for both academic and personal use. Of course, this is a potential issue for any student using school property or the school wifi to access the internet, but more so for those that are connected to the network at all times, like those living on campus. At some point, off-campus students go home, giving them the option to access personal material through their home internet connection. Students living on campus are never off of the network, creating more restrictions to the material they are permitted to access and also reducing their freedom and privacy as anytime they are on the institution’s wifi, they have to abide by their guidelines. This means that the IT department has access to what websites they are accessing and for how long. It also means that they have less of a distinction between and control of their personal and academic life. I remember when I lived in the dorms during undergrad, a lot of students were caught illegally downloading music because they were doing it on the school server and their activity was being monitored.

Separating the Public from the Private

Elm’s (2009) concept of privacy issues sitting on a continuum with the poles being “public” and “private” is a good visualization of how we tend to separate our lives, specifically our social media lives. There are times when I direct message a friend (private), times when I post a picture to my profile (public) and times in between, for instance when I post something and give access to “friends only”. The problem is when I post something that I clearly want to be on one end or the other and it ends up being somewhere on that continuum. An example that always concerns me is uploading my pictures on the cloud. I do this as I have learned that backing up my precious memories on a hard drive does not guarantee they will be backed up. I have been disappointed by my computer many times, losing all of my pictures only to purchase a hard drive and experience the same heart ache when it crashed. So now I keep a hard back up and a cloud backup. I do always worry that my picture folders on the cloud may be hacked into and shared, resulting in my “private” becoming “public”. Dennen also talked about privacy rights in the US and EU. Having been in the EU for the last couple of months, I have had to accept a website’s use of cookies when I access it. Some sites give you a yes or no choice but others just provide a disclaimer that by using the website, you are automatically consenting to it. If you want the banner to go away, you have to click to accept. I do also like that a company has to keep their subscription lists up to date and to consistently check with their customers if they would like to stay on a mailing list (though I know this may have resulted in a lot of organizations losing customers when it was first put into play). I was really intrigued by the idea of “technology transience”. Up until now, I have often written about students needing to make sure to update their privacy settings when using social media tools. However, Dennen (2015) hits the nail on the head when she says that someone may not change their privacy settings to their desired level if they have never used the tool before. It is not until they use the tool or after they experience a security violation that they know what changes to make. I also appreciated the discussion on the BYOD. This is something I struggle with in the classroom and have had a mishap with in the workplace. In the classroom, it’s always a struggle of wanting to make sure my students aren’t distracted versus wanting them to use their laptops to further engage with the material. Also, by using their personal devices for school activities, they may not be experiencing context collapse per say, but there is a mixing of their two different “worlds” taking place. There is also more potential for their private to become public. For example, if student has multiple windows open, let’s say their iMessage chat with a friend, and has a class discussion board page open, they may accidentally respond to a classmate with a message intended for their friend. This happened to a colleague of mine that was using her work phone as her personal and private device. She accidentally sent a photo from her weekend to her boss instead of her friend, not paying attention to who she was responding to. Lucky for her, it was not anything inappropriate. The mixing of school and work with private accounts and on private devices further blurs the continuum and also increases the chances of something on one pole shifting to the other pole with just one click.

To Force or Not to Force

Dennen & Burner’s (2017) article supports our previous readings on context collapse. After reading the material in this class, one thing I have consistently found to be useful advice is that students should create a separate Facebook account for their class. Though I, myself, have not done this in the classes I have taken, it would eliminate my concerns of someone accidentally seeing something I do not want them to. Another takeaway from this article is the adjustment of privacy settings. If students do not want to create another account, they can adjust their settings to prevent people from their class from seeing their personal information. They may also want to consider changing their profile picture (assuming they have limited the access of other areas of their profile) as I have come across some pictures that might be appropriate for friends but not so much for the classroom setting. Though I do have Facebook, I do sympathize with the students that said they did not have Facebook for specific reasons and were not too keen on creating one for class. I know many people who have been victims of stalking, have been contacted by those they do not want to or who just simply want to avoid the time and energy loss that many Facebook users experience. I did tend to agree with the student comments about it not being necessary to use social media accounts to connect with classmates and professors. I do like to use social media in my courses, but more so my students are engaged and so they learn to better use tools that they will likely have to use in the workplace or so they have the knowledge and experience to use these tools to effectively and creatively present information. I do not see why Facebook would have to be used in the classroom for engagement between those in the class. This is what Canvas is for. I do think students can be asked to use Facebook as a place to gather information for an assignment. One of my concerns with implementing Snapchat in my class is that not everyone will have it and though I think it is a tool that may give them an advantage in the workplace, I do not like the idea of forcing them to sign up for an account. The only time I really see the necessity of this is in a class like EME 6414, where the intention and focus is on how to use social media tools because without using the tools, you will have limited knowledge about them. This is why I have decided to split the class into a user group and non-user group, giving them a choice as to which group they would like to be in. I think this will not only enhance my research for a paper I’m writing about social media use in sport management classrooms but will also avoid the complaints from student who do not want to participate.

The Internet is the New Neighbor & the New Teacher

Rainie & Wellman’s (2012) explanation of the neighborhood and neighbors no longer carrying as much importance in people’s lives hit a topic that seems to be a recently reoccurring in discussions around me. A friend of mine posted an article on Facebook about how social media has led to a group of “indoor generation” kids that no longer go outside to play with the other neighborhood kids and instead play video games with kids in other cities, states and countries. Just last week, I had a discussion with a classmate about how no one knows their neighbors anymore. I do think that may be partly due to the internet now allowing us to exercise our social skills with others we may already know or meet. However, I also think that now that we can look up places to eat in the neighborhood, where the best markets are and how to get to the local park, people may not be relying on their neighbors for advice. Though neighbors do talk about more than just local hot spots, I do recall my mother often asking the neighbors where x was or y was when we would move to a new neighborhood. I do not think social media takes the full blame though because I do not think that people have replaced going to meet the new neighbors with anything else. It’s not like neighbors send you a welcome email (unless maybe moving into a development or country club area). They simply just do not come over and introduce themselves anymore. I think that everyone being so busy and working so much has a lot to do with it. When most people get home from work, they just want to go inside and relax and find entertainment and conversation at your fingertips. I also personally like to communicate via text more often than not. It allows me to respond when I feel like it and also gives me time to think about my responses more before “speaking”. I also agree with the authors that the internet as further enhanced and extended ties for many who know how to navigate the social media/internet world. As someone who has traveled a lot for work, school and pleasure, I have met a lot of people along the way. Some I have kept closer than others, but I have kept in contact with them all to some degree and this has only been made possible by social media. If I had to make a phone call, write an email or send a letter to all of them to keep in contact, I would not have time to do anything else. Even if I do not message them ever, even a like or comment under their photo keeps me in their memory and bridges the gap between when I last saw them and when I reach out for an ask, to catch up to say hello. I also think that in some way, social media has made people more understanding of not having regular communication. My friends and family do not have to call me regularly and do not become worried about me if they haven’t heard from me. If they see me post a picture on my Facebook account they have some level of understanding that I’m ok or what I’m up to. The mass reach of social media also makes it easier to make sure you don’t miss telling someone about a big event in your life. I was also recently having a conversation with a professor about how the internet has changed the way instructors (should) teach. Now that students have access to all of the answers, it is important that we teach them to think critically and to use their skills to investigate the source of the answers, why they might say what they do, what other “right” answers might be, etc. I also agreed with their comment that people want more information and they want it quickly. It’s hard to have a conversation without Googling something. I think this is a positive advancement as it gives us the ability to know more about more. On the other hand, it can also have negative impact as now we no longer have to think towards an answer or even remember anything if we can just look it up.