I had an interesting exchange with an online high school teacher who shall remain nameless. He works full-time in a school district that has a policy against “friending” current students on social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), but also works part-time for an online high school that has no such policy. He asked my opinion as to whether it was fair for him to friend one group of students, but not another group.

I chose to re-frame the question: Should you be friending current students at all?

My answer with most such questions is that it depends. I have a couple of hundred friends on Facebook. Some are really friends, some are long-lost high school friends, some are online school folks, a few are former students. At this point in time, I don’t have what you could call current students (beyond the graduate students I teach).

I have some friends who put it all out there on their Facebook page (pictures of them with alcohol, in semi-compromising poses, etc.). If you are in this group, my take is that you do not want to be friending students whether there is an official policy or not.

I don’t have those pictures of myself doing such things on any social networking sites. I feel reasonably comfortable having former students of mine (but still current students in my district) friending me on a case by case basis. Were I a different person, I would likely treat this differently.

And here’s the key: I am not saying that you should or should not post anything on these sites. What I am saying is that your privacy settings and your contact list should reflect whom you have selected for your audience.

Back to the online high school teacher. His thought was because he had a different relationship with the online students – he did not see them everyday – that it was reasonable. I always have problems with that word reasonable, but I can tell you that the parents of those online high school students probably do not see it any differently.

Right, wrong, whatever, teachers are held to a different standard. The Internet is full of examples of teachers who chose to push back on that different standard.