Internet Privacy

I wake up every Sunday morning to the horns of the CBS Sunday Morning theme song. Today, the first story was about a public HS teacher that was forced out because of pictures and a profane word on her Facebook page, that she believed to be private. The school board that fired her claimed to have received a complaint phone call from a parent- which her lawyers later discovered was untrue. As a public school teacher in NYC, I don't really have a fear of being fired for something so puritanic. The program brought up the reality of your "online reputation."

I just spent some time deleting records of myself from a locator website. I know my students are savvy enough to locate a person's information if they have their name, which I try to keep a secret at school. My social network page is private, only friends. Based on all of the information out there online about me, I wonder what my online reputation is. I understand why some of my teacher friends refuse to participate in social networking. I'm considering deleting my account, but do I really want to close myself off from my friends and freedom of expression because of a potential scandal?

Students today are going to have a very difficult time with their online reputation when they get older. They don't realize that th things they post will exist forever. They probably won't remember a third of the stuff the posted on MySpace when they were 14. When we teach our students digital citizenship, we need to include this lesson. Aaron Sorkins says about the movie "Social Network" that no one would want a movie made about their lives when they were 19. Essentially, this is what our students are doing today. They are making a digital record of their lives, at it's least profound stage. While some of my students may not be headed to Harvard or a Fortune 500 company, students everywhere need to be more aware of what they put out there and how it will reflect on their online reputation, and thus their actual reputation.