Thomas J. West Music

With the recent news article about the college student who committed suicide because his roommate broadcast his intimate moments in their dorm room on the internet with a remotely controlled web camera, I felt compelled to post a short article about protecting your reputation online. I see so many of our young people not understanding that even the careless things that they say online as a middle school or high school student (or college student, or adult) can affect their chances of being hired for a job or worse.

There really is no fullproof way to protect any communication you make online, no matter how many safeguards you think are in place. I tend to roll my eyes at people on Facebook who get all heated up over the lastest "breach of privacy". Yes, you can customize your settings with groups so you can make things visible to only certain people on your friends list, but once you've posted the material, no matter how many privacy settings you have on it, you have relinquished control of it to the world.

Watch this 2 minute video from CommonCraft entitled How To Protect Reputations Online in Plain English and you will quickly understand that once you post it anywhere, it can eventually be seen by nearly anyone. Everything is archived. We used to say in the 90's "A CD recording is forever." The Internet is forever as well. Even if you delete the original material, it is archived on sites like Wayback Machine.

So, it's quite simple - have integrity in everything you say and do online (or anywhere).

Negative comments, hazing, and insults will come back to haunt you eventually. Speaking and acting with an interest in the common good and positive relationships will make you much less of a target for negative attention. You certainly can limit your risk by controlling the privacy settings on Facebook, or being more selective about who you connect with online, but even the most careful person really has no control over who eventually sees the material.

Teaching Students About Digital Citizenship

I watch many of my former high school students from other schools I've taught for say and do some really unwise things on sites like Facebook. I've watched kids on sites like TinyChat and Chatroulette do incredibly disgusting and cruel things with no thought of the consequences to their future. An acquaintance of mine who was a music education major in his final year had videos posted by his friends on Facebook of the group of them singing drunk at a party. I am sorry to say that if this acquaintance applied for a teaching job at my school, I would advise my boss to pass him by without an interview.

Showing students videos like the CommonCraft video above is a good first step to at least make students aware of the everlasting abilities of the Internet. Having students write in class blogs is another great way to allow them to learn to represent themselves in writing online in a way that protects their reputation. Social media and Web 2.0 tools can be extremely valuable ways to learn, and if teachers aren't using these tools to teach students, the students themselves will use them without guidance. All the more reason why the hybrid classroom must be the classroom of the future (or the present!). Every course of study can include technology - even the ceramics class at my school could incorporate blogs, wikis, and photo galleries.

Students will be using online services their entire lives whether we teach it to them or not. Why not meet them where they are and guide them to use those tools to better themselves and society?

This article (c) 2010 Thomas J. West. All content on ThomasJWestMusic dot com is licensed under a Creative Contributions Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Please contact the author before publishing on or off-line.