Being the sports fan that I am, I have taken note of the recent outbreak of Twitter-related disciplinary actions involving athletes. Those of you who follow the NFL or NBA are familiar with the Chad Ochocincos and Gilbert Arenases of the world. And the trend has filtered down into the collegiate and high-school ranks as well. The Texas Tech football team was banned from tweeting last season, and just last week, a University of Idaho basketball player was suspended for tweets critical of his coaches and teammates. The rational for the disciplinary action is nearly always that the tweet is “conduct detrimental to the team.”

One of the great challenges and opportunities in online teaching and learning is the capacity to leverage the medium to take a distributed environment and create community. One needs only a moment to see the proliferation of social networking as evidence for the ability of the Web environment to support community. Clearly, not all tools work as envisioned, nor do all courses benefit from the use of certain tools. Yet, does a compelling argument even exist to not make use of such technologies in online learning? But what is the appropriate action when a discussion board is hijacked or a class blog goes up in flames?

Classroom management is not a subject often discussed in online-learning circles. With the increasing socialization of our online courses, is conduct detrimental to the team an issue? And what can be done about it?

We all agree it is imperative to continue striving to improve each student’s learning experience while maintaining an equilibrium that promotes the use of social tools and the establishment of an environment of respect.

The question is how?

I am curious to learn about strategies for dealing with, or better yet, preventing such conduct from this community.