Parents hurting Facebook?

I found this article on the Huffington Post Tech page, where one analyst claims that many teenagers are moving away from Facebook because their parents are using it. It follows that age-old belief of teenagers that if you parents are doing it, it must not be cool. The article also cites an AP report that says kids are getting fed up with friend requests from parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents, and so are flocking to Twitter for their social networking.

This all struck me as interesting, and made me think about what we're doing as educators using technology. Will our efforts to bring the technology our students are using into the classroom make it become "uncool"? If your parents on Facebook is not cool, how about your teachers asking you to do school stuff on Facebook? Apply question that to any number of emerging technology applications.

My students sometimes send me friend requests on Facebook, but I do not have current students as my Facebook friends; too easy to post something you really don't want your students reading. With that in mind, I think we need to take care in how we're using technology in our teaching, and how much we're using technology in our teaching. We may get to the point that our students will start seeing too much of a good thing, which may well start to turn them off rather than motivate. As with anything, a good balance and mixture of technology and "traditional" teaching methods is the way to go.