ABSTRACT
The semester ended with the usual flurry: exams, grading crunch, and anxious seniors making sure they passed the sections of their capstone courses. But this time, the end of the semester also brought something new: Facebook 'friend' requests from soon-to-be ex-students. Steven A. Meyers rightly cautions about navigating the line between 'instructor' and 'buddy', and helps people see that boundaries facilitate learning. Students appear to want to keep those boundaries clear from instructor interaction. And, women were statistically significantly less likely to find professor-student interaction on Facebook (FB) as appropriate. Sometimes, FB may be the most effective and fastest way to get in touch with students who have otherwise disappeared. FB may be the new communication and relationship frontier, but curious 'old school' paradigms seem to remain. Going back to the role distinctions, there are some really important implications when people lose sight of the blurring of roles that FB can engender.
