wesly-essay

How should schools handle social networking? If it were up to me, I would just say ignore it and hope it goes away. (You may ask, why am I so against this, well, I am constantly busting kids in my TEC 159 for being on Facebook when they should be paying attention, thanks to Apple Remote Desktop, plus I am the target of a flaming group on that site, so I am boycotting it!)

But it is here to stay in one form or another, a sociological phenomenon that will undoubtedly be the subject of countless articles in the sociology domain now and in the future. Some people will grow up wondering what life was like before their existence.

So what should schools do about these sites? My views are from the perspective of a college professor, not a K through 12’er, so they may be different from other responses.

It would be nice to be able to turn off access through the server during class time, but there are so many ways that it could be thwarted. It’s the narcissistic nature of the “entitled” youth of today to be on these things as much as they desire.

What should be done and is done to some degree at Harrington College of Design is to alert the students to the dangers of having their private lives going public. There may be employers or clients who will check out your activity! How much it can cost you is up to the parties concerned, however I have refused to write a letter of recommendation for one of the members of my “Fan Club”, who thought I was blissfully unaware of their cheap laughs at my expense.

Another danger, and I forgot to bring it up during our discussion on Saturday, is that there are scurvy knaves who do monitor these social sites, looking for parties. Some Harrington students ignored the Academic Advisors admonishments to not advertise their events, and some strangers showed up, dropped some names, said they were friends of friends, and at the end of the night, a whole case of camera gear disappeared!

Maybe this is one of those one in a million chance occurrences, but the world can be a cruel and unusual place, and there are people who do make it a point to prey on their fellow man.

Social networking is here to stay, and will be a huge part of professional life. Whenever my department has a guest speaker, and one that we had in recently just to talk about social networking, Saverio Truglia (who did the Reader cover photo for 2/4/10), says he wouldn’t have much in the way of business if it weren’t for that.

Both of the schools that I teach at, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Harrington College of Design have Facebook pages, with duly appointed czars to maintain and keep the pages up to date. So my bottom line on this whole issue is to perhaps have students take a workshop on how to use common sense when utilizing these venues of intercourse, but of course common sense might not be a part of the vocabulary, as these are the same people are texting while driving and there really should be no need to legislate against that if common sense did dictate how people acted in public! (The front end of my bicycle got totalled by a texting driver! Who hit and ran, no less!)