Should universities monitor their student's social media use?  Presenters and attendees wrestled with this question at the National Conference on Law and Higher Education, and The Chronicle of Higher Education reiterated this discussion on their website this week.  

Bouncing off Charlie's earlier post...A new study is showing that students who use Facebook during studytime (even if it's just on in the background) get 20% lower grades than their wow like totally uncool classmates. Many of the students deny that it really has an effect on their concentration, but I think they should probably be docked another 20% for thinking that. I realized early on that any synchronous or auto-updating tool was a huge distraction, which is why I never use instant messenging services or leave anything running in the background while I work. At any rate, it's probably worth passing this on to students (yeah, right).

From the Chronicle,

In a survey of 375 randomly selected students at Abilene Christian University, those who were more active on the social network were likelier to return for their sophomore year. On average, returning sophomores had 27 more friends and 59 more wall posts than did students who didn't return.

So all that time in class that student are using Facebook, well, that's increasing the likelihood that they will stay at our university? Maybe we need to have Facebook time in class for freshmen :-)

Today a student e-mailed me that she was confused by the university's new student portal, so she used Google to search for my senior-level writing course. Instead of locating the advanced technical writing course site, she stumbled into my personal pages and my business pages.

This is not much of a problem, since my personal pages deal with my freelance writing. Having a student read my CV isn't exactly an issue. It's not exciting reading.