Hello, I've also used Facebook in my class - we created a private group and hosted our online reading discussions in the group. I felt this turned out well - participation was opt-in, no one was compelled - but I also worried about the ethics of such an exercise, particularly the incursion of "school" into a primarily social place. The particular exercise you describe is slightly worrisome. Particularly, asking/compelling students to change their profile. Due to the many, mixed contexts of Facebook, such change could have significant implications for the subject or their friend group. And there's certainly a question of whether the students would be comfortable with such self-experimentation to begin. The data collection, on the other hand, sounds like an interesting hands-on research opportunity. Perhaps instead of asking the students to change their own profiles, you might think about creating a few dummy accounts of different age/gender for pooled use by the class? For my class this semester, we're moving our discussions out of Facebook and into Ning. In the end, I decided that moving school into the social space created some issues, and a site like Ning could deliver the affordances without all of the contextual issues. We'll see how that works. Best, Fred On Wed, 20 Aug 2008, Stephanie Tuszynski wrote:
Hello all-
I'm teaching an "intro to advertising" class this fall and I was considering using Facebook in class to talk about targeted ads. A few weeks ago I was reading a discussion about the rather unpleasant weight loss ads that seem to pop up to anyone identifying as female on FB and I switched my profile to have an unspecified gender and made my age something like 99 years old to see what happened. What I want to do is have the students make notes for a couple weeks on what ads they were getting on FB and then have them replicate the same thing - change gender and age status and see what happens for the next couple weeks, then we'll compare the data in class to talk about what kinds of ads are targeted to who, etc.
I am NOT requiring students to get a FB account for the class. Those who don't have one would collect the information provided by those who do and do some analysis. Also this is not research, it's a course exercise, so HSRB isn't a factor.
But still, I wanted to run this concept by the people who deal with these kinds of exercises and have spent more time thinking about the ethics of this kind of thing than I or any of my colleagues. Does this sound acceptable, from an ethical standpoint?
Dr. Stephanie Tuszynski Assistant Professor of Communication Bethany College
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
-- Fred Stutzman 919-260-8508 ibiblio.org/fred fred@metalab.unc.edu Co-Founder and Developer, ClaimID.com Ph.D. Student, Teaching and Research Fellow, SILS UNC-Chapel Hill