Teachers and Social Networking

Here are Google links that come up under a search for my name. About a year ago I did some cleaning up of my profile on-line. I worked for a company, UL, where I was having people search for me to find out information on the business line that I represented. It was important to me that I represent my company appropriately and have control over my on-line presence. The only information that I found, that was distressing, was a couple of criminals that shared my name. One was in the UK and the other is in Mercer County. Both were convicted of murdered; however, their pictures do not look anything like me.

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/paul-asbury/11/b4a/a2b - My linkedin page containing my resume and business associations.
http://fleshofmyflesh.com/CastAndCrew.html - Web site for a zombie movie that I was an extra for. It is very hard to connect this back to me unless I told you.
http://www.ehsalumni.com/1992/h.html - Alumni site for my wife’s high school.
http://www.knownworldt.com/ - If you can find my name on this web page then I can tell you the story.

I did not find anything that may have been unbecoming of as a teacher. I did have a MySpace page that I will cancel, as I feel it is a bit too personal for my students to be asking me about. Other than that, many of the web pages that I participate require memberships where my personal information is kept private.

I believe that teachers need to be very careful about their personal lives. As public servants we are under a greater deal of scrutiny than private citizens and just like politicians or police officers we need to understand people will often dig into our personal lives. One reason why we do our demographics project is to understand the community in which we plan to teach in. A community’s’ standards are probably something that we should look into before we apply for a job in that community.

Teacher’s free speech needs to be tempered against the time and place that we find ourselves in. While we have the right to free speech and it has been upheld in courts, we do need to recognize that we are a public figure. As teacher we may need to give extra care on the information we share and be conscious of the consequences of our actions. Certainly, our speech should not be held against us; however, we should think twice about what we do in public. While we can work very hard to have a clear division between our teaching and personal lives, to many people we are a teacher regardless of where we are.

The most interesting story, to me, was the teacher in Maryland that had the expletive filled rant about parents, children and teachers. I can see where someone might hold these opinions but to share this with anyone seems high unprofessional. This, and other stories show, an ignorance of the Internet and how once you put something out into the digital world it is there forever.
To protect myself and my job I will continue to keep ownership of my online persona. This means regularly searching for my name and especially making sure that any online memberships are kept private.

To protect myself and my job I will continue to keep ownership of my online persona. This means regularly searching for my name and especially making sure that any online memberships are kept private. The Internet can be a view into our homes. As teachers we need to be aware of when the shades are open to our lives