Separating your personal from professional online lives

I read an article today about an interesting topic, the writer was articulate and knowledgeable about online education. I decided this is someone worth following on Twitter (a decision I don't make lightly as you are about to see). As soon as Twitter pulled up her info I clicked Follow, before the feed even finished loading. Twitter shows you the most current postings by someone when you pull up their profile but my system was slow in loading the stream.

As I scrolled down I quickly saw this was not someone I wanted showing up in my professional Twitter stream. The messages went something like this:

• Article about online learning and MOOC's at ...
• Oh, honey I miss you so much, hurry back.
• So sad you are leaving on your trip.
• Article about math education and parent involvement at ...
• Kissy, kissy what a nice morning we had, and we only fight about the little things.

All the personal messages to this person's significant other were mixed in with professional messages. The professional tweets were things I really might have found interesting but the ratio of personal to professional was much too high. In fact it was more personal than professional from what I could see, maybe 2:1 personal kissy, kissy messages.

My Twitter feed is my professional face, my brand, my forum to the eLearning and education worlds. Colleagues and students can count on mostly professional tweets with the occasional personal commentary. The ratio of my personal to professional messages is about 1:100. I think my followers can handle scrolling past the very occasional sports comment or shared recipe.

I have separate Facebook accounts for personal and professional uses as well, not so much because what I share on the personal side needs to be secret. I just don't think my professional colleagues care about my grandchildrens' antics. Those colleagues who are also friends of mine have been invited to both accounts. Students and most colleagues are only invited to the professional account. I also have separate blogs. There is this blog for professional writing (which needs to happen more often) and a personal blog for recipes, hobbies, and sharing personal angst.

What it really comes down to is respect for other peoples' time. My students and general colleagues don't have time to scroll through all my personal thoughts and shared images to find the gems about eLearning. I respect their time, and I respect my time enough to divest myself of folks on Twitter who don't understand the need to separate personal from professional streams. Needless to say, I unfollowed the person within minutes of following her.

Social media... Not just social or for socializing - News from Joplin

Thank you to Kristin Lineberry a student in my University of San Diego Technology for Teachers Level II course for this incredible and moving insight.

Kristin said:

I will be the first to admit that I am a facebook "lurker." I have had an account for about 3 years now, and at first it was fun and amazing to reconnect with all my college and high school friends. I rarely post a status update, but I log on to facebook almost daily to read the interesting and sometimes amusing anecdotes that my facebook "friends" post. I have totally avoided twitter... not only do I not really "get it," but I just don't understand constantly sending out "tweets" about myself to an invisible audience, many of whom I don't even know! I became an avid texter only about a year ago, and I have never used skype.

If you are a high school or middle school teacher, you are aware that the majority of our students get all of this. They not only post on facebook, they "tweet", they text, they IM, they email, they skype.... and on it goes. In the "Did You Know?" video we watched this week we learned that it took TV 13 years to reach a target audience of 50 million, but that it took facebook only 2 years to reach the same. Like it or not, social media is our future and we need to learn to embrace it.

This week, Joplin, MO was hit by a horrific tornado. My husband is from a small town about 10 miles from Joplin, and my in-laws still live there. We didn't hear about the tornado on the news, we heard about it first on facebook only minutes after it happened. Within minutes, many of my husbands high school friends were posting all kinds of information on their facebook pages. We learned that phone lines were down, power was out, most cell lines were tied up, but facebook was the best way to communicate. The principal of destroyed Joplin high school even stated in a newspaper article that all communication about the school would come through facebook. And this is when I realized: social media is not just for socializing. People were looking for loved ones- others would repost the information on twitter. Many facebook sites shot up instantly with information about how to help: everything from naming missing people to helping reunite lost pets with owners.

Kay mentioned a post by a previous student in which she discussed her son and friends using facebook as a forum to discuss coursework. I thought that was pretty amazing. Social Media sites like facebook are obviously here to stay. But what place do they have in education? I know facebook is blocked at many school sites now. Should it be? I ask your opinion on this because I am really not sure.

In the Partnership for 21st Century Skills website, they mention Life and Career Skills as an important component of education. Under this heading are subtopics like: flexibility and adaptability, and social and cross-cultural skills. Critical thinking is also mentioned with communication and collaboration being an integral part of the learning process. Students can obviously communicate and collaborate in a discussion group on a page like facebook. Does this have a valid place in education today? I believe that it does. As we saw in videos and read in readings this week, the job market has changed immensely. People now do business over computer screens with partners on the other side of the globe. Technology and social media especially, has made us all closer and given us all more information. I believe that we need to start incorporating some of this into education so that students are better prepared... and they learn that social media can be for more than just socializing.

Circles

I feel like the world runs in circles of late, or perhaps it is just my online world. Someone posts a link, I retweet it on Twitter, then suddenly someone new is following me. I posted a message about a web design class I am auditing and suddenly a web designer group was following me. Goodness, it was just one post, and if you read it, I am just taking a class. I am certainly not a web designer.

The other day I created a podcast with an audio version of a course announcement. Nothing exciting and it was clearly labeled Precourse Welcome (wow, sounds fascinating!) yet within a few hours someone had found it and wanted to be my 'friend' on the podcast site. How does someone find a podcast called Precourse Welcome and decide it is so appealing they want to be a friend... Sorry "Uncle Sid" but I didn't think this was a close enough tie to form a relationship with you!

When I do find something worthy of sharing then I go through my own little set of circles to share with all. A few family and many of my co-workers are on Twitter so I tweet the find. Then if it is a good one, I share on Facebook where more family and friends will see it. Of course there are some family and friends who... *gasp* are not on Twitter or Facebook... So I email it or text it to those folks or make a phone call... good grief!

Sometimes the communication circle feels a bit more like a noose than a group hug! Remember in the old days, you wrote a letter, put it in the mailbox. It took days, maybe weeks to update people and share news. Now, if I am without my phone for an hour and don't answer a text immediately I get messages like,

• Are you all right?
  
• Do I need to come check on you?
  
• Where have you been?
  
• Are you getting a massage?
  
• Are you mad at me?
  
• Where ARE you!?"

Outside my circle of well-meaning/caring friends and family with whom I am connected on a minute-by-minute basis, today's communication methods are even more dizzying. Today's finds were Cloudworks and Google Wave (which isn't even available yet but I am signed up for it.) I have more ways to communicate with people than I can keep track of, and everyday there are more to try out. I have been trying to keep my Delicious account up-to-date. My rationale is I can send students to it to look for resources, but the honest-to-goodness truth is, I need it to keep track of all these sites for myself!

I had set up my new Acer purchased in July so it would keep track of all my login information in Firefox. However, the Acer had serious issues and had to be returned to Costco... who handed me over $600 in cash no questions asked BTW! Once again I had to go through all the circular motions of setting up a machine. Updating Windows... restart... more updates... restart... download AVG anti-virus... download new updates... restart. ARGH! And then I had to start saving my logins all over again. I don't even pretend to remember them all now, I can't! This is just another area where I have become ignorant, I knew the logins at one time... but I can't keep them all in my head any longer.

My head just keeps spinning and I continue to be ignorant! Till later!

P.S. Stay tuned, I have more to say about paper constipation. That idea garnered some interesting examples to share with others!