Social Media as Part of the School Curriculum

In the last few years with the exponential growth of the Web 2.0 our digital footprints are growing. It is not only the things we post on our own blogs and social networking sites about ourselves, but also about what others post about us.

I routinely google my name to see what comes up, and lately I google my children's names especially since sites like Facebook and Nexopia are obsessions for them. As much as I tell my teenagers to watch what they put out there and what others put out about them, they really have no concept. Does a teenager have the reasoning skills to consider that the photo of them passed out at party my not look so good ten years from now when they are applying for that dream job, or worse yet 15 years or 20 years from now when their own children find it online? And that is all only a click away? Teenagers are not known for their ability to plan for the long term. So how then do we get them to be concerned about and monitor their own digital footprint?


ClaimID has a list of best practices which will help you and your teen find what is posted about them, but what do we do once it is out there? There are lots of stories of individuals losing their jobs due to something posted on Facebook or a blog. The unfortunate part is we have unleashed this enoromous Social Network with the best of intentions and it was not until further down the road that we realize its ramifications.

As we all know that once it is on the web it is there to stay. To help address this issue MySpace has put out a School Administrator's guide to Social Networks. Some schools like the University of Oklahoma and the Academy of Discovery are putting out guidelines for their students, as are even some businesses for their employees such as Dell and the BBC. Karen Montgomery has provided a great template for schools and school division to use to set guidelines around Social Media. While these are great measures will they really protect our teens today? I am guessing not, I suspect this generation will have to experience the growing pains of Social Media, but we can only hope they will pass their wisdom onto the generations that follow.

I think that we need to do today however, is to make Social Media part of the mandatory K-12 curriculum. Students need to be taught at an early age the pros and cons of Social Media. The need to understand the importance of their digital identity and their footprint. Just like students care about their reputation at school they should be taught to care about their online reputations. You might argue why should the schools being teaching it, because unfortunately many of this generations' parents do not have the level of experience with Social Media that their child does. Will it fix all the problems, of course! But at least it is a start.