Facebook

I have been a member of Facebook for a few months. I really enjoy the brief comments and chats people have and it is a quick way to keep up-to-date on what people are doing. I have been able to get in contact with old school, uni and social friends.

I must say that some of my kids friends, who are in their 20s are at times a bit doggie and I don't like the language they often use, but I mostly ignore it. I have ignored requests from people who have (in my eyes) inappropriate homepages and I tell them if I run into them in the real world why I ignored them. As I live and work in a small community I have friends who are parents of the kids at school, so I need to be very mindful of the content and contacts on my page, but so far all is going well.

I am not into all the quizzes and game stuff people play on Facebook and I mostly ignore them. Even though I do chat with people I tend to avoid chats if I can.

Just a bit more to add, I actually would not want my school kids to access Facebook at school and I'm glad it is blocked. There is often inappropriate language and pictures being posted.

While I think there is value in learning how to communicate online with each other and learn about online social etiquette and we do need to cover these things as part of a values framework in school. But we don't have time to do this comprehensively in school and I actually think the teenagers learn these skills by participating in their own time outside of school. My kids have managed to make many friends through online games and social networks with very little guidance from us. We only guided them in understanding about giving out personal information that might put them in a risky situation.

I think the best thing about learning how to get along online is that if you get it wrong you can reinvent yourself and start a fresh. This is not so easy in the real world.