Mark Monroe, from UMSL, started with a discussion of what social media is. He started with Tufts University using YouTube videos as a replacement for application essays – the dean of undergrad admissions didn’t realize how public and followed these applications would be. He talked about other social media missteps, then went into TOS’s of Facebook and Twitter. He then talked about FB’s ownership grab of user photos over 2009’s Valentines day.
He discussed the idea of cyber-bullying and policies – his school has no specific policies, but the activities are covered by code of conduct policies.
Much of the discussion was very educational institution oriented, so I’m skipping a lot…
The upshot of the discussion was that teachers are asking students to post homework assignments on Facebook and this is probably a bad idea. I’m in agreement, but not for the same reasons – Mark said that students uploading writing or photos to FB as part of an assignment are giving up their copyrights to that work. This is not exactly true – but they are putting that stuff up in a much more public place than their teacher’s desk, so there may be issues with privacy that are more pressing than IP issues, really. There were several questions from the crowd about impersonation accounts, but not a lot of advice – FB is notoriously bad about getting back to folks about issues, though they are getting better at getting rid of accounts that impersonate someone.
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