Thursday, February 5, 2009

What not to do on Facebook if you are a Professor.

Don't do what this woman did.  Do not write on Facebook that you are prepping for class by checking Wikipedia.  Do not ask your Facebook friends for suggestions for tomorrow's lecture.  And do not suggest that your colleagues should be made to jog in place to get ride of a few of them.

"I feel like such a fraud," she wrote on her profile. "Do you think dartmouth parents would be upset about paying $40,000 a year for their children to go here if they knew that certain professors were looking up stuff on Wikipedia and asking for advice from their Facebook friends on the night before the lecture?"
The professor, Reiko Ohnuma, thought that only people she had designated as "friends" could see these zingers, but she had accidentally set Facebook so that anyone at the college could peer in — including her students. One of those students took a screen shot of her Facebook profile and posted it to the student newspaper's blog in December, and soon other blogs were linking to the tale of the professor who clearly needed to take Facebook 101. Now when you search for Ms. Ohnuma's name on Google, stories about her online misadventures rank high in the results.
Oops.





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