UF study looks at preservice teachers' Facebook entries
In colleges of education, nothing says “generation gap” quite like Facebook.
Professors are flustered at the idea of preservice teachers posting intimate details of their lives on the Web. College students, raised on social networking sites, often don’t understand what the fuss is all about – when websites can be taken down or restricted to only a few users.
A new study by University of Florida College of Education researchers took a closer look at the issue, surveying the Facebook sites of hundreds of prospective teachers.
“After Facebook led to a couple of controversies in the local community – an online-bullying incident and a situation in which a parent saw some damaging pictures on a teaching intern’s website — we decided it was time to take a closer look at what is going on here,” said Associate Professor Kara Dawson, one of the authors of the study.
Facebook is one of a growing number of “social networking” websites that allow people, usually young adults, to post information about themselves, and link their sites to the similar profiles done by their friends and acquaintances. The Facebook profile has become the Generation-Y version of the business card, but the wealth of information available on the sites – and users’ tendency to post pictures of themselves in their most frolicsome moments – has professors worried about the impact these sites will have on their students’ careers.
Dawson, Associate Professor Rick Ferdig and education-technology graduate students Jade Coutts and Jeff Boyer analyzed the Facebook profiles of more than 300 elementary education majors. Among other things, they found that almost half of students with non-private accounts gave out the name of their apartment complex or dorm; three out of four listed their sexual orientation; 98 percent posted at least one photo of themselves and 73 percent had “photo albums” on the site.
Giving out so much personal information, particularly addresses, may be unwise from a personal safety perspective, Dawson said. It may be doubly ill-advised for teachers, who may be called on to advise younger students in safe use of the Web. On the other hand, Dawson notes, teachers should have some experience with social networking sites precisely because their students use them.
A generation ago, any elementary school teacher would have been horrified to find that someone had posted pictures of her drinking at a college party. Today it is the prospective teachers who are doing the publishing, and parents and principals who are horrified. Dawson said the UF survey shows that many preservice teachers do not fully understand the impact damaging pictures can have on their careers.
“Facebook users seem to understand social networking as evidenced by their dramatic adoption of this site,” Ferdig said. “However, they do not seem to understand the broader implications of networking outside of their group of friends.”
The average pre-service teacher in the study had 102 Facebook “friends” – people identified as links in the user’s network of acquaintances. Although it is unclear just how much Facebook serves to augment or replace users’ face-to-face social networks, Ferdig said the study highlighted undergraduates use of social networking tools to share important aspects of their daily lives.
Dawson added that it is clear that students are using the networks to build social capital. And it is clear that neither preservice teachers nor education professors are making proper use of that capital.
“We need to explore how to use this tool to increase our professional social capital, and we need to encourage prospective teachers to do the same,” she said.
The UF researchers expect to do follow-up studies looking at a variety of issues, including how users’ tagged photos give insight into identity development, how to encourage self-reflection by Facebook users, and why some prospective teachers do not have Facebook sites.
The authors presented the study at the annual conference of the Society for Information Technology in Education in San Antonio in March.
