Thing 18: Social networking

 

I will admit that I enter into this topic with a lot of bias and little I found alleviate my concerns.  I am sure there are a lot of urban legends out there about Facebook and MySpace but I still vividly remember the girl who committed suicide when a fake online boyfriend on MySpace broke up with her.  The fake boyfriend turned out to be another child’s mother.  Just a couple of month ago at the beginning of this semester, there was a story of an educator losing her job when she complained about parents on Facebook.  When clicking the APSU 23 things link about creating a Myspace profile from about.com, I followed some of the other links.  One lead me to another site on about.com called common sense media, which offered a review on Myspace for parents.  It found the site not appropriated for those under 16 year olds and labeled the site “iffy” for 16-18 year olds (or for most of the school aged children through high school).  It labeled the site as having no educational value and it was not an educational medium.  I think the greatest importance for a teacher to learn about these sites is because students are using them.  With the recent attention placed upon cyber-bullying due to a suicide of a college student at Rutgers University (if college students aren’t strong enough to handle this kind of pressure, then why would we think younger children can?) teachers need to be aware and tuned in to how students are using (or abusing) both Facebook and Myspace (okay, so a weak connection between Facebook and Myspace, as in this case the spying was done using a webcam but my point I think is still valid, teachers do need to pay attention to cyber-bullying).  I opted to set up a Myspace account just because in my reading it appeared to be the most popular.  I signed up using an alias (Brown Squirrel) and using a fake birth date (both disappointingly too easy to do – if I can do it so can an online predator) and after following the other steps set up my account.  Upon setting up my account I attempted to unload some photos, which surprisingly took quite a while to do (they uploaded very slowly) and I could not select a batch of photos to upload (there is a way to do this, I just clicked on the tutorial on MySpace and still couldn’t figure out how to make it work).  After only getting one photo loaded I figured I had already spent too much time on this and decided to cut my losses and move on.  Still searching for a good educational use for social networking, perhaps my bias is just a little too big to overcome.