How do you go about creating a social media policy for a correctional setting? Corrections is an interesting place to even discuss the idea of social media let alone devise a policy that’s anything but “no”. In fact, when I look at the social media of the agency I work for, that’s essentially what it says. Especially whilst at work. Except that there are a few exceptions/overrides. As a member of the education team, I’m allowed a little leeway to use social media to find and create learning; both for myself and my students.
Certainly, there are some extreme examples of why a correctional agency should default to a “no access” sort of policy for social media. Look, for example, at this article on Why Correctional Facilities Need a Social Media Policy. The article doesn’t discuss why it needs a social media policy for the guidance of proper usage, but more about how to properly prevent bad usage. This report (Developing a Policy on the use of Social Media) takes a more holistic approach to the creation of a policy. It’s still very much a restrictive view of social media, but as public employees, that’s something that has to be at the front of all of our minds whenever we are using social media.
Our assignment for this week was to create (or modify/revise) a social media policy for our work. Because my employer has a fairly restrictive policy, I didn’t have a lot of room for modification. Instead, I decided to use the exception for education to develop an expanded policy that goes into a bit more detail on what is and isn’t expected from employees. I broke the policy into two sections. The first section is a more general policy for all usages as a public employee, and the second section is intended to guide usage while at work.
If you’d like to see the resulting policy, you can do so here: Social Media policy for DOCR Educators. Please remember that this was a class project, and is not to be construed as official policy in any way. Also, I’m sure there are some things that I’ve forgotten to include, or missed adding that should have been. Feel free to leave a comment here if you find one of those and let me know what it was/is.
Shane Ede: My EDTECH Learning Log 