Guest Post: TO POST OR NOT TO POST

A guest post from Allison Morris at OnlineClasses.Org.
Thanks, Allison!

There are 900 million social media users plugged into Facebook alone, and nearly 500 million of them log into the social network every single day. In fact, in just one day on Facebook, 250 million photos are uploaded, and 532 million statuses are updated. And that doesn’t even count the millions of tweets sent, tumblrs updated, and instagrams snapped.

With so much personal content constantly being uploaded to the web, it’s no small wonder that so many recruiters and would-be employers are turning to various social networking platforms to determine the personalities of prospective hires. If you’re working toward your online degree, chances are you hope to one day apply for, interview at, and ultimately secure a great job.

The first step to preparing for that future job, however, is to stay forward-thinking in the types of things you post, tweet, and otherwise put up online. In the information age, when everything about a person is available for scrutiny, the fact of the matter is that one incriminating photo or post can make or break the way people perceive you in the future. And even if your social media habits don’t have an immediate impact on your employment dreams, the laws of social media etiquette dictate that sometimes, people need to think before they overshare.

The following infographic provides a handy flowchart to determine the ever-increasingly important question: To post, or not to post?

Where Social Media and Public Schools Meet

The New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE) has drawn an interesting line in the sand with social media. The department released a set of social media guidelines this week that lay out a line faculty, staff, and students can't cross.

There are two fundamental guidelines:

1. Teachers can have their personal Facebook, Google+, Twitter, or other social media pages, but they can't interact on those sites with students. They call this use "Personal Social Media."
2. Teachers can interact with students using social media but must do so through the Department's own sites. They term this "Professional Social Media."

The guidelines also require that DOE employees behave professionally regardless of whether they're using personal or professional social media.

On face value, I like the core message about remaining professional regardless of what social media you're using. Yes, teachers should do whatever they can to keep their professional life separate from their personal life, if only because their students need their own space too.

But the guidelines fall short in addressing student-to-teacher interaction. What if a student follows his teacher's Twitter feed? Can the teacher be disciplined?

I also fear the effects of making faculty go through their institution's social media managers whenever they want to use the media for their classes. Kinda goes against the whole premise of social media. And education, for that matter.

I think schools need to grab social media by the horns, not shirk from it, which is what the NYC DOE's guidelines are trying to do. They're trying to walk a fence between embracing social media and ignoring it, and when you're walkin' a fence, you're bound to fall off.