Sunday, December 06, 2009

Dealing with 'Friends': Using Multiple Feeds to Separate Personal and Professional

Kax has got questions about what to do when a student starts following your Twitter feed. Check out his post and the comment discussion that follows.

Personally, this hasn't been a problem for me.

I've got several Twitter, FB, Delicious, YouTube, etc... accounts. They are set up for a variety of both personal and professional uses (education PLN / music / family / and more). My high school students understand that while they are welcome to contact me through my professional 'classroom' feeds, I will refrain from accepting and/or block 'em from my personal feeds.

Seems like good rule of thumb in dealing with minors as well as a way to teach kids that there are different uses for different social media.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks for sharing your experience. My problem with multiple feeds is just preference. I want to be one whole person on one Twitter account. I want my life simple in one place. Laziness, probably :)

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  2. @Kax

    TweetDeck has worked very well for me in this matter. I can check one place for all my feeds, follows, mentions, DMs, etc. and can compose Tweets from multiple accounts on one single page without logging on and off.

    Someone earlier today mentioned something about Twitter Lists taking over in this regard; but that is yet to be seen.

    Shelly

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  3. difficult situation to cope with. nothing bad happens if you do not do anything bad.

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  4. Couldn't agree more with this post. I have a life that has nothing to do with school and blurring the distinction between the two is potentially dangerous. While I'm careful about what I put online, the same can't be said for my friends not in education. Using a single account for private and professional use can link people from those two worlds who should have nothing to do with one another. I don't want to have to qualify for a student what exactly my friend Rob meant by his colorful 140 character description of the Broncos' defense against the Steelers.

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