Facebook Woes

[Butters]

Hi all,

Wanting to pick some brains regarding Facebook and it's application/use in a College environment.

Our current policy which I believe to be inadequate basically allows facebook access to students at any given point in the College. We do however block apps/messages using WebSense but certain higher powers want this restriction removed.

Does anyone have any factual information on the E-Safety implications of this as I'm involved in writing a document against this idea and allowing facebook to be open in general. Ideally we'd put it as a quota option giving students say an hour tops to browse content non related to college activities.

Any ideas on this would be greatly appreciated!

[OB1]

Hi Butters.

Taking the stance that schools are charged with safeguarding both children and staff on site, there are numerous reasons not to allow complete access to facebook in schools.

Have a sniff around for university studies and some of the bigger news stories involving facebook over the last year, a surprising number of them centre around a school.
This BBC article raises some interesting points.
This page gives some advice to children who are having problems online, though you could read a lot into the face that it needs to exist in the first place.
This paper raises some interesting points.

The teachers I know personally have opinions ranging from indifference to revulsion, though none of them actually use facebook themselves.

This blog post explains the smoothwall solution to this conundrum.

Hope this helps.

[jamesfed]

I know many Unis take the stance that Facebook is ok as the users (students) are of an age where they are responsible for their own actions (and so the Uni can wave all responsibility to needing to filter certain content in their AUP) - I don't know how this would mash across onto a college though....