A pair of newspaper articles I ran across this weekend have me quite concerned for the state of social media in education in the Australian state of Queensland. Both The Courier-Mail and News.com.au are reporting that the Code of Conduct has recently been amended to specifically address perceived issues with use of social media by students and teachers.

According to the articles, state school teachers are now “banned from contacting students on Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and other social networking sites amid growing concern over inappropriate relationships.”

What is the most disconcerting though, is the fact personal sites are now expected to be kept “private and appropriate.”

More information required

Before I go any further, I should point out that I’ve tried to locate information that is of greater substance that the relatively superficial reports provided by the media – particularly the Code of Conduct itself – however thus far I haven’t managed to find any (if you know of any please post a link in the comments area).

For instance, what is particularly unclear is the question of what level of education the Code extends to. Certainly, I would imagine, primary and perhaps secondary school students; but what about tertiary institutions like TAFE and university?

Implications and Impact

Use of social media as a means of communicating with people is core and fundamental to what social media is. As such the prospect of restricting teachers in how they connect carries serious repercussions for the sorts of activities they can engage in, and indeed inhibits many valuable learning opportunities from taking place.

Personally I understand the concern about protecting students from “inappropriate relationships,” but frankly this is going about it the wrong way. Certainly it’s best practice to use formal communication channels when contacting students, however restricting all contact elsewhere will have wide-sweeping and adverse impacts – not simply to students either, but to professional development opportunities for staff themselves.

Severed Connections

In many, many regards, the perception of social media by policy makers as an ominous, threatening, dangerous menace is leading to horribly detrimental policy decisions. A key example of this is the virtually complete absence of professional opportunities for staff to learn about social media. Existence of filters that block access to sites make matters worse, since staff are completely prevented from even seeing the tools during the day.

Increasingly this has driven curious academics underground into personal hours to explore what social media is and how they might use it. However under these conditions, access to peers and experts becomes much more complicated, and harder to come by, since the institutions they actually work for are failing to provide the local support opportunities required. Left to their own devices, instructors are completely alone and have to turn outside the institution for help.

So it is not the least bit surprising that people naturally turn to existing networks to establish ties and connections. Yet it is the same social networks that are being targeted by the Code of Conduct which tend to be the first place people look to for peers and experts.

Unfortunately learning networks do not grow particularly easily when visibility and access are restricted – relationships and linkages are not necessarily reciprocated when people cannot see what new users are like, and what their interests are.

For instance, when Facebook profiles are restricted, or Twitter posts kept private, even if a new user finds a set of existing users with whom they see common areas of interest it is unlikely that their request for friendship (in the technical sense of linking one profile to another) will be accepted, or responded to in kind.

In these conditions it is entirely possible that we’ll begin to see higher rates of abandonment of social media exploration in the wake of frustration and confusion, in turn leading to a reduction in innovative teaching methods, diluted learning opportunities for students and the stifling of digital literacies that may become critical for students in post-school life.

…and we haven’t even broached how gross an invasion of privacy all this is.