Should teachers communicate with students via social networks like Facebook and MySpace?

A school district in southern Mississippi recently enacted a policy prohibiting teachers from communicating with students via social networks like MySpace and Facebook.
The Lamar County School Board said the policy was approved because of concerns that casual contact between teachers and students via these sites would be unprofessional.
I am curious what you think.  Is the Mississippi policy on [...]

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Hierarchy is dead; long live collaboration

I’ve been in the cub scouts, a college social fraternity, the U.S. Army, the Episcopal church, several corporations, and now a university faculty. I’ve seen my share of hierarchy.
But hierarchy as a model of business organization is dead. Web 2.0 is seeing to that. Collaboration is king. As I write this blog post, I am [...]

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Digital literacy: I blog, therefore, I am

I’ve been having a running conversation with some of my colleagues in the Master’s and Doctoral programs at Towson about digital literacy. We’ve discussed at length whether or not blogging helps or hurts literacy.
Many of my fellow educators who teach Mass Communication or Public Relations, especially writing, require students to blog. I do not. But [...]

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