Facebooking One’s Students
The discussion over on The Philosophy Smoker got me thinking on this. I used to have a no-friending-undergrads-I’m-teaching policy. But now it’s so easy to use friend lists to make sure nobody sees things you don’t want them to see, I’ve changed my policy.
I still think the policy should be not to discriminate between students, so recently I have friended any student (current or past) that asks. But I don’t send requests: I can’t ask everyone, so that would be discriminating again.
Moreover, this seems like just the obvious policy to pursue (unless you decide to friend none of your students, but that seems unnecessarily unfriendly given the alternatives available).
Is there anything wrong with my policy?
There’s a whole discussion about it here:
http://philosophysmoker.blogspot.com/2009/05/your-students-on-facebook.html
cheers,
There’s one here too:
http://longwordsbotherme.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/facebooking-ones-students/#comments
My point was only that if the author cares about the question, there’s no reason why she wouldn’t be interested in seeing what other people said about it, even if it’s somewhere else.
It seems to me that the younger generation (myself included) have, by and large, no problems accepting friend requests from students who offer them. I follow your policy except for that bit about bothering with privacy settings, and I get only around one or two requests per semester.