Quote:
Originally Posted by Chris is me
Luckily, I'm not a teacher.
Without Facebook, our team would NOT be able to do iterative design. We don't use Facebook to talk about our private lives, we use it for work. There's a difference. Not all technology is evil.
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Let me explain further. It is simply against policy at some of the schools that we're involved with for students and school employees to have social media interactions with students. I do not want my team, or its students/coaches, to put a high school in a difficult position. I don't think it would take long for funding to get cut, or students to be barred from participating in robotics, if we were found to be in violation of school policy. Actually, to the best of my knowledge, it is NH state policy that forbids this.
The state and the school districts have their own reasons for this policy, however paranoid they may be. I do not friend students because I will not permit something as trivial as Facebook or social media interactions to jeopardize our team because of the school's policy. I may not like the policy, I may not agree with the policy, but I'm not going to thumb my nose at the school because I'm not a teacher and my status as 'volunteer' might let me slip through some loophole in the policy.
Email groups, particularly google groups where you can share google docs and calendars are very effective for design collaboration and general team communications. I used google groups for many design projects in college and it is what we currently use for our team while our web team sets up SVN on our web server.