Facebook and Gmail: my separate lives

There's been a ton of press coverage about Facebook's new messaging service v. Google's Gmail and the idea of email in general. One article by Rob Reynolds (once a colleague of mine at OU years and years ago!) predicts that Facebook will become the new platform for education and business communication... to which I say: EEEK. Even though I might be the high priestess of online education at my school, proselytizing about teaching online to anyone who will listen, this raises an issue about which I feel strongly and which, perhaps, might separate from other folks who are passionate about online education, to wit: I believe in keeping professional and personal lives SEPARATE. Very separate.

Yes, I believe that education should be very relevant and personal and student-driven... but at the same time, I think education and business and other professional activities should be kept separate from our personal lives - for our own sanity! That is simply what has worked for me: when my professional life is in the dumps, my personal life is a very welcome refuge. If I am having personal woes, I can take refuge in my professional live. The few times in my life when they have been coextensive: recipe for disaster. From my life's experience, I know I need to keep that separation clear.

I would guess, in fact, that is why I have so gladly embraced the opportunity to conduct my professional life exclusively online. I teach online, and I am not even living in the state (Oklahoma) where I teach. My entire professional life is conducted online and in print, and I am very happy about that: I far prefer teaching online, blogging, and publishing books (print books and ebooks) to being in a physical classroom, going to department meetings, and attending conferences. That's a purely personal preference; I know others feel differently about their professional activities, of course.

So: my professional life is online, but my personal life is definitely offline. I don't use Facebook. My husband and I don't need online communication tools. I don't post pictures of my cat online (well, occasionally - but that was just to test the camera in my iPod, I swear!). My parents are barely able to manage their email; we talk on the phone and I go visit. That suits me just fine.

Now, admittedly, if I were really keen on keeping in touch with people in farflung places, I would not be averse to using online tools to do that - but I would certainly not be using the same tools to communicate personal matters as I do to conduct my professional life!

That's why I don't like Facebook - it practically invites you to blur those boundaries to the point of the boundaries becoming unrecognizable. We use a social network (Salesforce Chatter) where I work, and I think that is fantastic - exactly because it is about work, and it is how I can interact with colleagues at work. If we were using Facebook instead, I would not participate; I'm really not interested in straying over the boundaries into my colleagues' personal lives.

So too with my students. I am someone who gets to know my students well in an academic sense, but I am wary of getting caught up in their personal lives. In fact, I think one of the great tasks I face with them is trying to pry them free from their active social lives and personal identities to see themselves as future professionals, to see themselves as people having something to contribute to society and to culture beyond their circle of friends, real or virtual. If I were trying to conduct my class inside Facebook, I don't think I would ever manage to distract them enough from their friends in order to achieve that goal. By using a dedicated Ning as the social network for our class, I can at least hope that it is possible!

So the idea of having my personal and professional lives merged in Facebook doesn't appeal to me in any way shape or form - and that is totally aside from my personal distaste for Facebook as a corporate entity. When Google, a company I greatly admire, tried something similar with Buzz, I opted out within a minute: Google, thinking it was being helpful, wanted to automatically share my "Buzz" stream with the people I most emailed - which happened to be my very worst students, the ones to whom I had to send endless emails perhaps because of chronically late or incomplete assignments, plagiarism, whatever (ugh). So much for social metrics.

I will definitely watch the advent of this new Facebook attempt at hegemony with great caution and concern. There's nothing there that dampens my passion for online education, but if Facebook becomes the new Blackboard, as Rob Reynolds predicts, then that just means we are going from bad to worse, in my opinion.