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The Lamar County school board in Mississippi has recently decided to limit communication between students and teachers outside the walls of the school, or more specifically restrict their communication online. These new rules do not limit any students (or teachers) from creating online profiles on sites such as Facebook or MySpace, but does limit their interaction on such sites. The board specifically “prohibits teachers from texting or communicating with students through Internet social network sites.“

Although they seem to have only mentioned Facebook and MySpace specifically, I would imagine that it would also apply to other sites such as Twitter, identi.ca or even leaving comments on personal blogs.

According to Superintendent Ben Burnett their “intent is to limit the personal communication between teachers and students” because they are afraid of the line between “professional and personal communication” getting crossed. This sounds logical, after all why would a teacher, someone who is a grown up want to be “friends” with someone who is a teenager, or possibly even younger online when in their real life they are an authority figure to that same person.

However moving into this tech and web centric world that we are now living in the lines are easily crossed, especially with the early adopter social networking crowd.

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