Schools can't stop wondering what students are up to on Facebook

Nate Anderson:

It's graduation season, which means that students, teachers, and administrators alike are all thinking about one thing: Facebook.

Schools around the globe have a fascination with--indeed, sometimes a fixation on--the social networking site and what their students are getting up to online. Questions about the appropriate response to student material on social networking sites have existed for years, but they're exploding into serious policy questions (and even laws) as such sites become almost ubiquitous teen hangouts.

For instance: can school administration use social networking to keeps tabs on what students do during the school day? What about things they do after leaving school property?

In the St. Louis suburb of Clayton, the big news this week was the resignation of Clayton High School's principal, Louise Losos. According to local paper the Post-Dispatch, someone named Suzy Harriston had made Facebook "friends" with more than 300 people, including many high school students, despite the fact that no one knew who she was. On April 5, the school's former quarterback claimed publicly that "Harriston" was really Losos. According to the paper:

Posted by Jim Zellmer at May 9, 2012 1:46 AM
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