Teaching our Children (and Ourselves) How to Use Social Media with Care

By MOTOI Kenkichi [CC0], via Wikimedia Commons

I have always tried to impress upon my students the power of the Internet and social media to create cognitive surplus. By sharing and collaborating online, one can easily reach an audience of thousands. This can be a powerful force for good in the world which I have blogged and presented about this in the context of crowdsourcing, the fifth son project, and educating our children in a digital age.

I often talk to my students about the need to carefully cultivate their digital footprint online. They want to be in control of what potential educational institutions and employers see when they Google their name. This involves more than just the usual advice to pause before you post and take down anything that could be damaging. Rather, as my visionary principal Rabbi Eli Ciner emphasizes at Yeshivat Frisch, our students should be inspired to pursue their passion whether it be in academics, the arts, athletics, or any other creative pursuit.

I recommend that students should then design an online portfolio based on this passion using social media tools and/or blogging. This is advice that I try to follow myself as I carefully cultivate my thoughts through my various social media channels. I love using Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and understand the place for each of these, although I have not quite figured out Snapchat which is the app of choice for most of my students. See the cartoon below which expresses my feelings about it.



The challenge with regularly sharing on social media is that each platform has its own etiquette and protocol. Twitter does not work the same way Instagram and Facebook does. Snapchat has its own way of doing things which seems arcane to anyone over thirty making it difficult for people like me to wrap their head around. I experienced this first-hand recently with Linkedin.

I decided a few days ago to update my LinkedIn profile. For the uninitiated, Linkedin is basically a social networking app for the business community. I try to update my profile periodically. Not because I am pursuing a new job. Baruch Hashem, I am very happy in Frisch with my talented and hardworking colleagues and incredibly creative and menschlich students. Rather, I utilize Linkedin as a part of my digital footprint and it also serves a dual purpose as many people look me up to speak at conferences, participate in panels, or for consulting. So I polished my current job description at Frisch, edited and added some of my other experiences, and created a new section with an updated list of my publications. When I saw a question on Linkedin asking "Notify your network?" I clicked "Yes" figuring why not notify people about the changes I made. Was I wrong.

Soon I started receiving congratulations on my new job, which was just a list of consulting experiences, while my current job at Frisch was still very much at the top of my profile. A couple of people even messaged me on Linkedin and one came over to me in shul asking if I was still at Frisch. I had not realized that by adding another experience, consulting, to my Linkedin profile, and clicking Yes to notifications, everyone on my network was notified either in Linkedin or via email that I had a new source of employment. This was NOT my intention.

I have since remedied the situation, turning off LinkedIn notifications and further consolidating my profile so that it would more clearly express my professional persona. But the damage was done. Short of telling the world what my real intention was, which is what I am doing right now in this blog post, I am sure some will still have a mistaken impression.

My experience as someone who considers himself to be quite tech savvy especially concerning social media, gives me pause when thinking about how to educate my students. Social media is really powerful but is also really hard. One mistaken move, even with the best of intentions, can have consequences. I don't think for this reason that we should ban our children and students from using apps like Instagram and Snapchat. Students need to be educated and banning rarely works anyways. But this should give us and them pause...

Social media apps are powerful and with great power, as Stan Lee famously wrote, there must also come-- great responsibility. It is my hope that if we share our social media experiences both positive and negative with our students, and give our children the space to learn, they will gain the care and responsibility to unlock the cognitive surplus embedded within this new world.