This just in: Teachers are people, too!
Coming from the “nobody should be surprised about this” file, apparently 20-something teachers are just like every other 20-something out there. I’ve seen stories like this before, about how young people just out of college have to realize that their public information means that anybody can see it, but this story takes a turn for the sinister because these people teach your children. My favorite parts are where the reporter calls out some teachers that leave Facebook profiles open, only to have them close later. No need to just get a point across that people have done this, but let’s name these scourges so their names will pop up in google searches for all time, ruining future employment chances!
In some cases, teachers apparently didn’t mind that their Web sites were raunchy and public — at least until a reporter called. Alina Espinosa, a teacher at Clopper Mill Elementary School in Montgomery, had written on her Facebook page in the “About Me” section: “I only have two feelings: hunger and lust. Also, I slept with a hooker. Be jealous. I like to go onto Jdate [an online dating service for Jewish people] and get straight guys to agree to sleep with me.”
Asked about the page, Espinosa said: “I never thought about parents and kids [seeing it] before. That’s all I’m going to say.”
Minutes later, access to her site was restricted.
As somebody just getting into the whole blog thing, I do have to say that I took some of this stuff into consideration, considering a recent debate about anonymity in edublogging. Now, I don’t have any wild pictures or anything out there since I am a terrible introvert, but there’s still the possibility that I could say something which might annoy others or that might embarrass me later. But when it came right down to it, I decided that I need to stand behind my words, no matter how bone-headed they might be.
May 4th, 2008 at 8:44 am
“some Facebook or MySpace teacher profiles, which are far, far away from sanitized Web sites ending in “.edu”
I think this misuse of spatial metaphor pretty much summarizes the problem. People still think site boundaries mean something. These teachers probably don’t realize that a search by name brings everything into “one place” (still a bad metaphor), and that a bored kid, a stalker or a journalist can put together, in a matter of minutes, everything traceable back to them by names, public nicknames, IP addresses registered on blogs, public e-mails and the like.
So, yes, this is from the “duh” file.
May 4th, 2008 at 9:18 am
The weird thing about it is, it’s surprising that they don’t get it.
Which actually bring up a point for me: What’s the cutoff for these digital natives we like to talk about so much? I’ve been using the internet to collaborate and connect with people since I was in high school, over a decade ago. I’m obviously a huge geek, since that’s something not everybody did back then, but does that make me a digital native? Or did I get started too late? These young teachers are 6 or 7 years younger than me, so quite frankly I would have thought they would be digital natives and would better understand how easy it is to find anything.
May 4th, 2008 at 4:30 pm
“The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed.” I know quite a lot of parents who discourage children from using computers – EVER – or limit computer use to word processing, pretty much. Some people even in industrialized countries don’t have computers at home by choice, and of course most people in the world still can’t afford personal computers. I think we can’t expect universal computer literacy from people of any age, yet.
It does weird me out in many ways.