I'm taking courses in how to teach online. This is part of my retirement plan, such as it is. (Teachers don't all get big fat pensions, by the way. Republicans lie a lot. But that's the topic for another post.)
Part of the current course has us exploring Facebook as a teaching tool. Apparently this is a great ploy for motivating middle school kids who are more easily seduced into education if it seems like something else. For my community college students, and myself, I worry about conducting class in public to such a degree. You can hide the posts from random googlers, I realize, but not the names of your "friends." Maintaining privacy on Facebook can be done, sort of, with the use of an alias that they don't want you to use and have software to spot. (Sybil Drinkwalter got past their radar, but Grammar as a first name did not.)
But you have to be savvy to stay in control of your privacy on Facebook, more savvy than most of my students, among them people being stalked by vengeful exes, young people with double identities (gay with conservative immigrant parents is one example of the complex scenarios that develop. Or a woman from a strictly traditional Muslim immigrant family whose friends and activities have become a bit more Americanized than others in her family realize). There are people with political and legal histories that provide any number of reasons for preferring privacy. And not one of them will want a prospective employer who googles them five years from now to see what their English is like now.
And I get nervous, too, viewing the spread of photographs on my new Facebook page in my legal name ... "people you might know" ... you betcha. There they all are, lined up in random order, Witches, occultists, community college students, community college administrators, my sister in Tacoma, my born again cousins in Texas, people from my high school class whom I haven't been in touch with for nearly half a century, and if it's been that long there obviously have been reasons why not. Of course, I don't have to friend them all, but if they want to friend me, it seems rude to ignore them. And it's disconcerting to know that there is software out there that can so instantly determine that I "might" know them all.
And I get nervous, too, viewing the spread of photographs on my new Facebook page in my legal name ... "people you might know" ... you betcha. There they all are, lined up in random order, Witches, occultists, community college students, community college administrators, my sister in Tacoma, my born again cousins in Texas, people from my high school class whom I haven't been in touch with for nearly half a century, and if it's been that long there obviously have been reasons why not. Of course, I don't have to friend them all, but if they want to friend me, it seems rude to ignore them. And it's disconcerting to know that there is software out there that can so instantly determine that I "might" know them all.
