Ethical issues raised by educational use of social media
When faced with the question about ethical issues with social networking, we must first examine what ethical issues actually are. From looking at the name you might be able to speculate what ethical issues are and as the BBC states, they are a system of moral principles and a branch of philosophy which defines what is good for individuals and society [1]. So basically they are things that can lead to dilemmas with our rights and responsibilities, moral decisions and what we think is right and wrong.
So how do ethics in education tie into social media. Well, quite simply, there are many ethical issues that social media can emit. For example, there are problems with legislation where it is cloudy for the educators to know what is right and wrong to enforce, online harassment can be escalated on social media, plagiarism could be easier to commit, and there are issues about knowing the offline identity of others [2]. For this post I will be focusing on harassment in education, for both the students and teachers.
The internet and social media is growing, getting larger and attracting more people every day, with over 1.3 billion active users on Facebook [3] (there are 7 billion people in the world, that is 1 in 7 people signed up to just Facebook alone), almost likely that if you wanted to search for someone you know, you will find them with ease and little effort.
Advert for Be Share Aware by the NSPCC about cyber bullying
As the odd but kinda relevant video clip portrays, personal information can be shared and sent anywhere in a very little amount of time, so this could to lead some terrible bullying and classroom trouble if they share content that could be used against them.
Personally I always felt that there was and should be a line for what a student can know about a teacher’s personal life. Social media is making it a lot harder for teachers to separate this because their pictures, activities and personal information is so easy to access by anyone. Letting a student know some personal information could lead to the teacher’s time of teaching them a lot harder since they could lose their authority over the troublesome student.
So, social media can cause some serious problems with students and teachers when it come to harassment and cyber bullying. As most problems with personal data on the internet, you can easily counter and cut down the possibility of harassment by keeping control of your data and by only putting the things that you don’t mind being shared to the world on a social media site.
References
[1] BBC. 2014. Ethics: a general introduction. [ONLINE] Available at:http://www.bbc.co.uk/ethics/introduction/intro_1.shtml. [Accessed 22 March 15].
[2] Online Newsletter. 2014. Social media in education: ethical concerns. [ONLINE] Available at:https://newsletter.alt.ac.uk/2014/07/social-media-in-education-ethical-concerns/. [Accessed 22 March 15].
[3] Statistic Brain. 2015. Facebook Statistics. [ONLINE] Available at: http://www.statisticbrain.com/facebook-statistics/. [Accessed 22 March 15].
[4] NSPCC. 2015. Be Share Aware. [ONLINE] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sch_WMjd6go. [Accessed 22 March 15].
