After a bad day at work in 2010, a fifth grade teacher named Christine Rubino vented to her friends on Facebook, calling her students “devil spawn” and saying that she would not throw a life jacket to one if the student were drowning. This was just after a student in a nearby district had drowned on a school trip to the beach. Rubino’s reference was no accident.

One of Rubino’s Facebook friends was a colleague who reported her to the assistant principal, setting off an investigation that led to Rubino being fired from the job she’d held for 15 years. Only after an appeals process that lasted several years was she able to be reinstated, though not without controversy.

In retrospect, it’s easy to say that Rubino should have known better than to make such comments on Facebook, but Rubino maintained that this was her personal account and that no parents or students would have seen what she said if not for the investigation that followed making it public. The intended audience was limited to Rubino’s own friends.

Some formats of information, like posts on Facebook and other social networks, have a small audience that we can curate ourselves by approving friend requests (or not). With other formats, such as magazines that can be bought and read or found online by anyone with access to them, there may be less control over the audience. Anything that can be found through a Google search on the internet is fair game for anyone who can find it.

In the Messaging quest, we talk about how every piece of information comes with a message. As a creator of information, you have control over the message you send. However, you may not always have much control over who receives that message, even when you think you do.

In the example with Rubino, she chose to vent on her private Facebook page. What if she had chosen instead to write a report to her boss about the classroom behavior that may have inspired this post? What if she had written a blog about how to work with unlikable students intended to help teachers who might find themselves in similar situations? What if she had conducted a study on how teachers’ private attitudes toward their students affected student learning and published the results in a scholarly journal?

In each case, the message would be the same: students can be difficult to deal with and teachers don’t love their jobs 100% of the time. However, the way the message was sent would change, as would the way it would be received. Rubino’s hypothetical blog post could still be seen by friends, colleagues, and even the parents of her students, but if the tone was instructive rather than inflammatory, it would be less likely to inspire the outcry that followed her posts on Facebook.

As an important last point, remember also that no matter the format you use to send your message, those who receive it may not have the same background and experiences as you. In the case of education, a parent who home schools his or her children may receive a blog post about how to deal with difficult students differently than someone who is a teacher in a public school since the students the homeschooling parent is dealing with are his or her own children. A blog post or article advocating corporal punishment for misbehaving students would be considered acceptable in some areas of the world where corporal punishment in schools is considered standard, but not others, where it is banned.

To learn more about the issues associated with taking into account the wide variety of backgrounds and experiences that may be represented in your audience, complete the Global Audience quest.

Pick one of the following options to complete this quest.

OPTION #1:

Have you ever had a piece of information you created be discovered by an unintended audience? What were the circumstances that led to the discovery? How might the discovery have later changed your approach to sharing information?

OPTION #2:

Have you ever shared a piece of information someone else created with an audience for which it was not intended? What were your reasons for sharing it?

OPTION #3:

Think about a post you’ve made to a social network, a blog post you’ve written, an essay you wrote for a course, or a report you wrote for work. What was the message of this piece of information? What strategies would you use to keep the message the same if you made changes to how it was sent, such as turning a social network post into a blog? How would these changes affect the way the message was received (or not)?