The Foreign Service Journal, June 2009

average incomes. “None of my schools reached out to me, and in general I simply had to find people based on names,” an alumna of Kodaikanal International School in India explains in an e-mail. “A fledgling LinkedIn group was started by another alum when the school itself said they were not inter- ested in administering such a thing. Very strange, backward thinking, which may be related to the histori- cally bad Internet connections in India — but it has not stopped them from asking for money (by snail mail, generally).” The alum who set up the LinkedIn group for KIS says he in- tends to hand it over to the school once its membership is too large to ig- nore. JimKeson, a former principal of the Copenhagen International School, told me that CIS hired its first-ever direc- tor of development in August 2008, and that the alumni page would be her responsibility. Jim, who had ad- ministered the clunky alumni page since its inception and had also taken it upon himself to keep a real-world social network of phone numbers, ad- dresses and meetings, sounded some- what relieved. “You are right about the relatively low amount of linkage on our official alumni Web site — most of the younger graduates use Facebook for active contacts,” he wrote. Privacy Issues “I truly believe in the social value of the Internet, though I am appalled by the lack of privacy and protection, the intrusion, the easy access,” one of my interlocutors wrote, pinpointing one of the dilemmas posed by social networking. “For instance, anyone can post anything about me — pho- tos, gossip, it doesn’t matter what — and I have no way to stop or inhibit it. 60 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 0 9 S CHOOLS S UPPLEMENT Continued on page 66 I was surprised that the international schools lag far behind in utilizing this versatile medium.