Colonnade

Issue date: 2/16/07 Section: Campus News

     "Jake" has requested to be your friend. Will you confirm his request?
     That is what you would have seen, had you been approached by a white, blonde, baseball cap wearing, bare-chested young man on Facebook or MySpace. This particular young man was a nineteen year old Georgia Military College student pursuing his associate's degree in criminal justice. Nothing separated "Jake" from the thousands of college-aged people on these networks, or so it seemed.
     "Jake" did not bother to include a few important details about himself and excluded some others. "Jake" was not a GMC student. "Jake" was not nineteen. "Jake" wasn't even white. "Jake" wasn't "Jake" at all. However, that's okay because, here in America we have a few major documents that say he can do that, right?
     Right, unless you are Derrick Moffitt or any other adult misrepresenting himself for the purpose of deceiving minors. Moffitt is a 36-year-old GMC professor and prep school softball coach who was arrested Friday, Jan. 26, after being charged with felony exploitation of a child and stalking. The accusers are two teen boys and a teenage girl, but the call-in complaints have been growing. Moffitt is now free on a $25,000 bond, but he is restricted from GMC or any other campus, restricted from computers, and prohibited from contact with the victims or anyone 18 or younger.          
     Anybody who has been on Facebook or MySpace knows how entertaining and/or useful those sites can be. You would also know that the accessibility to these sites is far from protected; the former requiring some kind of network affiliation and the latter requiring nothing but an email address. In a country like ours where anybody, and seemingly everybody, can use these sites, where do the lines between educators and students get drawn? Should there be lines? Should professors be allowed to use sites like these and communicate with students?
     "Its America," Dean of Faculties, Dr. Ann Gormly said. "I wouldn't put any prohibition on faculty that I wouldn't put on everybody else. MySpace and Facebook are social networking tools, so its their choice. I'm neither for, nor against them.”
The internet has always been a little grey regarding rules about how it can be used. It is true that these websites are open to the public but are there unspoken boundaries or "norms" between educators and students?
     Dr. Stephanie McClure uses Facebook, but is careful when it comes to her students.
     "I don't (invite students),” she said. “But I haven't ever rejected anyone's invitation. I let students know that their profiles are public and I encourage them to use WebCT or email, because  that's what I check most often."
     Professors are aware of the websites' communicative capabilities and this can be seen in "groups" such as the "Faculty who use Facebook because it's the only way to communicate with students" group.
     However, there is a difference in the way some educators use these sites compared to the way students do.
     "I have a strong sense of the public, permanent, judgeable nature of something like that,” McClure said.  “Its this frozen, static me that people can interact with when I'm not there. So its my professor self that's on Facebook, not my Stephanie McClure self.”
     It seems that some professors recognize boundary roles and others might not, in the same way that some students are cautious about what goes on their pages and others post their lives for the whole world to see.
     GCSU student Odinaka Ezeokoli has faculty as friends on both MySoace and Facebook.
     “I have two professors on MySpace and a few on Facebook, and I asked them," Ezeokoli said.
     Ezeokoli doesn’t believe it would be unusual to be friend requested by a professor.
     "I don't think a professor I wasn't cool with would want to be "friends" with me, so as long as I as cool with them I wouldn't have a problem with it," said Odinaka.

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