++ An alternative that may meet your pedagogical goals and be a better fit for those who aren't on FB, don't want to alter their profile pages, or doesn't require violating FB's TOS is to use the ad creating page, where you can enter an arbitrary page and look at demographics by age, location, and networks and see how many people you will reach. It could be interesting to compare those statistics to the actual ads that students see and try to understand advertisers motivations for targeting certain ads towards certain demographics. http://www.new.facebook.com/ads/create/ On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 12:11 PM, Paul Jones <pjones@metalab.unc.edu> wrote:
I support Fred and Trel in saying that you need not and should not subvert policies especially since you can move to another fairly easily. As OpenSocial (okay IF then if you like), takes off this will be even easier.
On FB vs Ning. I had the students in our seminar vote on how and where to do assignments. They asked me for options at first so I supplied 3 but encouraged them to introduce others. My suggested options included: posting to delicious, oral book reports, and adding questions for class on a wiki. Someone suggested using Ning and I showed a site to the class. In the voting, still underway on Doodle, everyone has voted for using Ning.
Facebook? It wasn't even mentioned. (I found that particularly interesting as I asked who of the class was on FB and everyone -- save a visiting Korean scholar -- raised their hands.)
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