The start of the fall academic term often means meeting new people and refreshing your connection with colleagues, friends, and acquaintances. Although many of those meetings and conversations might take place in the hallways and coffeeshops of your campus, others might be entirely digital in nature. The timing, methods, and significance of interpersonal interaction continually change along with our uses of technology.
Define Your Boundaries
How you choose to set boundaries on the kinds of communication you have with colleagues and students will ultimately be a personal decision, albeit shaped by campus policy (on office hours or the use of email) and departmental culture (some departments expect your attendance at frequent social events, and others don’t).
Because the language of social media (following and friending) tends to blur boundaries, it’s very important that teachers communicate carefully with students about their own practices (I and many other faculty simply have a rule of not friending students on Facebook, for example) and especially when social media are included in course requirements. Jason and Alex’s discussion of the creepy treehouse problem offers some good suggestions on making your reasons for using social media for the course transparent.
Ryan’s Unfriending for Sanity describes how he reduced his Facebook friend list by thinking carefully about how he was already using different social media networks: “I realized that I use Twitter primarily for professional communication, and Facebook almost exclusively to post personal updates.”
Billie’s Think Before You Tweet (or Blog or Update a Status) raises important concerns about the unintended consequences of online remarks.
Jason’s Twitter, Teaching, and Impersonality points out that
. . . a certain kind of sharing is actually impersonal, in that it leads not to the personal life of the professor, but into a common intellectual engagement with the material.
Miriam’s Creating Your Web Presence: a Primer for Academics explains how to create “a consistent, professional web presence” on several different platforms, including Academia.edu and LinkedIn.
Choose Your Methods of Communication
Over the two years that ProfHacker has been around, we’ve written quite a bit about different social media tools. Some of our earlier posts are no longer relevant (Buzz, anyone?) but many still offer useful information:
Try Something New
Erin’s post on the new social features of Amazon’s Kindle explained that Kindle users can now choose to make their books and notes or highlights publicly visible, and can follow one another. (Note that by default your notes and Kindle library are set to private.)
Brian introduced Google+, noting its inclusion of video chat and integration with other Google products. But he helpfully offers this caveat, which holds true for any social media tool that you’re not already using:
And it’s another social network. If you’re like me and read ProfHacker because you want to find more ways to get your work done, then G+ might not be for you.
Any social media tool comes with benefits and drawbacks, and it’s worth carefully considering them before and after jumping in.
What would you like to learn about using social media? Let us know in the comments!
[Creative Commons licensed image by flickr user rikkis_refuge]