The Public & Private Face of a Teacher

This post was inspired by 2 comments I overheard this week from my students. One student stated that she was planning to close her Bebo profile. The other was eagerly discussing with her fellow students her use of Bebo. The first student was a PGDE(Maths) student in her mid-twenties and the later was an 17/18 year old B Ed 1.

The PGDE student was voicing her concern that personal information that she had in her Bebo profile might find it's way into the domain of her new pupils. I think her fear was that she might have to fend off personal question from the pupils on her return or that she would be deemed to be less than professional if she had a Bebo website. The B Ed student has just arrived on the course and after 3 weeks is excited to make new friends in faculty and on Bebo.

These events have been highlighted by my interest in Bebo. I now have a profile and have been scouring the pages for familiar faces. I tried to find my old schools - the secondary school doesn't exist anymore and is not listed on Bebo. The primary school is there but nobody from my class of '81 is registered and it would appear that nobody of that era has registered 7 years either side. This makes me wonder what the demographic of bebo is and whether a 36 year old university tutor should be on there.

Undeterred I decided to get down with the young posse (note the streetwise lingo man) and enrolled in the schools I had taught in from 1993 to 2001. These memberships have provided substantially more people (pupils) that I recognise and show a substantial increase in Bebo membership for the 18-28 year olds. This got me thinking and after a little searching I came across a couple of sites that indicate that Bebo is very much for a youth market (12-18) and that MySpace.com is becoming more popular with the 30 somethings.

It would appear that MySpace is the social network for my age group and that Bebo is the place for the young - digital natives. Wait a minute; I'm a digital native. Anybody that started with a ZX81 and still likes/uses technology must be 1st generation digital native. I'll leave that rant there!!!

So this raises the questions: is Bebo only for the young? Is social networking software segmented by age demographics? Is age an issue relating to a social network that we should be concerned with?

After my tangent into Bebo demographics, I return to the issue of whether teachers/students should be socialising online. My gut instinct tells me that it shouldn't be an issue of suitability or professionalism or personal security. But the simple question remains: is it appropriate for a teacher or student teacher to have an identity/profile on a social network like Bebo or MySpace?

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Technorati Tags: Bebo, social software, Digital Native, MySpace, TeacherEducation, TeachingInScotland.