I have extremely mixed feelings about social networks. From a personal standpoint, I don't feel that my daily life is so exciting that I need to post every minute of my life. It is awesome for keeping in touch with my family members who live in Texas, but I don't care for the rest of the world to be in my daily business. I have a Facebook and I only spend about an hour a week on it; I can't say that I have a strong desire to get on there at the end of a long day. Since school has started, I don't have much time. I use it more for family than anything else. Additionally, I feel that they are not very personal; I'm "friends" with people that I never really talked to in high school. And, I still don't talk to them.
Professionally, there are a lot of advantages to social networking, and you never know what doors may open up by keeping in touch with people. However, I feel there is a thin line between networking for professional and personal reason with the same "identity." As a teacher, I have to be careful of the people I network with and what is posted because students often what to know "about you."
From my small experience, I feel that social networking does fit into the life of me and my students. Through our grade book system, students are able to email us and they are always asking questions. I will often email back and forth throughout the evening. I believe that if it were set up like a social networking site, students would interact with it even more. Students are often looking for help with homework and different things. Additionally, they would be able to get help from anybody that was on the site at the same time; they wouldn't need to wait on me to get back to them.
I agree with the thoughts you expressed regarding the need to keep one's personal and professional life as separate as possible. My students are amazed when they find out that I'm on Facebook. They're not quite sure what how to take it. I've had "friend" requests from students, but never accept for the same reasons you mention in your post. You are quite right - teachers have limited free time - after work, there's usually more school work to do, as well as family commitments. Time is a precious commodity, as a teaching professional, I only regularly follow a few networks - Classroom 2.0(a ning) and Edmondo (blog).
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