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I do have some concerns, of course, related to privacy issues, and I would not want students to feel that I am doing this because I want to pry into their personal lives (my goal here is not to "friend" all my students but to get them talking about statistics they see in everyday life and sharing things with each other). ?So, I'm wondering if anyone on this list has tried to use Facebook and would be willing to share what was done and how it worked, or give some tips on "best practices" for use of Facebook in an educational context.

Privacy concerns aside, Facebook is good for keeping in touch and networking, not so much for collaboration. The best tool I have found is Crabgrass, which makes use of social networking features, but is foremost a tool for long distance or group collaboration: http://crabgrass.riseup.net You can post material, add tags, have threaded discussions, there is an internal chat area for each group, good searching, a wiki, task list management, and more. It has a pretty nice UI as well. You can learn more about it here: http://crabgrass.riseup.net/about/ The problem: to get all these features you need to download and install the software or use their demo site, which is a bit slower than your own install. http://crabgrass.riseup.net/demo/ The newest version will soon be up on their hosted (they have a version up there but it is an old version when the UI was totally different and honestly pretty bonkers, I would not advice using it). The upgrade will happen this fall and once their hosted site is up and running, I will send a note. I used it once for a group project and after that experience will use it for all my future classes. It is just so much more interactive and user friendly than Blackboard and does not have the privacy problems of commercial sites. All best, Biella **************************************************** Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor Department of Media, Culture, & Communication New York University 239 Greene St, 7th floor NY NY 10003 212-992-7696 http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman