question about use of Facebook in classroom
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
Stephanie: I think that this could be a form of mixed methods research. Descriptive data is being collected that is clearly measurable and observable. The students who do not get Facebook pages could be interpreted as a control group. At the very least it is a real time simulation exercise. Having said that, I used to work for a few ad agencies and radio stations before becoming a national producer and an adjunct professor and we were taught to look at the data but to always keep in mind that some people lie about their personal data. I noticed this trend when I did my doctoral research and exhibit A of this is the current US election where people have not been consistently telling the truth when polled and the data has the media and some researchers perplexed. Data mining is a huge culprit here. More people are being to realize that "someone" or "some entity" is keeping tabs on them so human being the emotional and rational creatures that we are have decided to disrupt everything. I said all that I have said to say there are ethical issues on both sides now because of convergence technologies that previously did not exist. I think that you have taken great care to avoid such a thing and you are not profiting financially. The only question left is this: will anyone be harmed? It is remotely foreseeable that the data mining of the company may be impacted. My question would be is it ethical for them to gather data on your students that will invariably be used for advertising and potentially sold to others for profit. I think you may actually be doing a critical service in exploring this phenomenon. I know that you are a filmmaker like me and this would be a great web documentary. At the end of the day I think you are fine ethically. Dr. Chris A. Heidelberg Loyola College Adjunct Professor -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Stephanie Tuszynski Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 7:18 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom 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/
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
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-- 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
I'd add also that changing your profile does not have instant results. When I started getting ads targeted at the "over 40" crowd, I deleted my birth year from my profile, but I still get those ads and it's been well over a month since I deleted the information. I am glad to hear others are as offended as I am by the persistent ads for diets every time we women log in. Nancy
Nancy - you've deleted them from your public profile, but it's still stored in your account. It has to be due to COPPA. Ads are delivered based on back-end information, not front-end information. Thus, when Company X buys adds from Facebook, they tell them to just deliver said ads to people over 40. Then, when Facebook generates your page, it'll ship you an ad, regardless of what info is public on your page. Facebook makes it a pain in the ass to change your birthday, but if you set up other accounts with different birthdays, you can see the span of ads generated. (Yes, I'm a dork.) danah On Aug 21, 2008, at 7:05 AM, Nancy Baym wrote:
I'd add also that changing your profile does not have instant results. When I started getting ads targeted at the "over 40" crowd, I deleted my birth year from my profile, but I still get those ads and it's been well over a month since I deleted the information.
I am glad to hear others are as offended as I am by the persistent ads for diets every time we women log in.
Nancy _______________________________________________ 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
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- - - - - - - - d a n a h ( d o t ) o r g - - - - - - - - "i was just a girl in a room full of women licking stamps and laughing i remember the feeling of community brewing of democracy happening" (Ani DiFranco, Paradigm) musings :: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts
Hey Danah did you finish yet? Or are you busy creating international scholarly incidents LOL? BTW - I love your work and even though I have been done for nearly a year and had to wait to walk, I followed the saga. People like you are the future and it looks bright from where I am sitting (I guess I am too, but I got you by a few years LOL). Chris -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of danah boyd Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:15 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom Nancy - you've deleted them from your public profile, but it's still stored in your account. It has to be due to COPPA. Ads are delivered based on back-end information, not front-end information. Thus, when Company X buys adds from Facebook, they tell them to just deliver said ads to people over 40. Then, when Facebook generates your page, it'll ship you an ad, regardless of what info is public on your page. Facebook makes it a pain in the ass to change your birthday, but if you set up other accounts with different birthdays, you can see the span of ads generated. (Yes, I'm a dork.) danah On Aug 21, 2008, at 7:05 AM, Nancy Baym wrote:
I'd add also that changing your profile does not have instant results.
When I started getting ads targeted at the "over 40" crowd, I deleted my birth year from my profile, but I still get those ads and it's been
well over a month since I deleted the information.
I am glad to hear others are as offended as I am by the persistent ads
for diets every time we women log in.
Nancy _______________________________________________ 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/
- - - - - - - - d a n a h ( d o t ) o r g - - - - - - - - "i was just a girl in a room full of women licking stamps and laughing i remember the feeling of community brewing of democracy happening" (Ani DiFranco, Paradigm) musings :: http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts _______________________________________________ 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: I will be using both Facebook and Ning for my class because of the open and closed nature of Facebook and the closed nature of Ning. What is ironic is that technically speaking Facebook is a very closed network and Ning is more democratic and open. We tend to think of Facebook as open because of the amount of eyeballs but it is highly restrictive when you run afoul of their rules which when you ask them to explain you get vague answers. I had a celebrated run in with them because they disabled my account and after I wrote a post on site (and worked through back channels with some of my friends who have become real colleagues and friends) my site was re-activated with all of my friends. I like Ning because you can determine what gets in and out and there is less advertising. Ning is Facebook before it was opened up to everyone and before Microsoft got involved. Ironically, Mark Andreeson, a web pioneer and created of Netscape, is one of the founders of Ning and he is now a special advisor on Facebook's board, so I am not sure whether moving your class to Ning will change anything in this age of media consolidation. I spoke to Rafat Ali, CEO of paidContent, about his recent sale for $30 million online for an interview, and he admitted that the money changes things. I think it is safe to say that Facebook and Ning will end up as strategic partners or Ning will get bought outright by Microsoft or Facebook. My big question is why don't you have students create pseudo accounts to protect their identities. I use Facebook as a communications tool as well as content distribution tool. Chris -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Fred Stutzman Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 9:54 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom 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 _______________________________________________ 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/
Heidelberg, Chris wrote:
My big question is why don't you have students create pseudo accounts to protect their identities. I use Facebook as a communications tool as well as content distribution tool.
Chris
Large unanswered social issues aside, I'd be wary of requiring/compelling students to knowingly break the Terms of Service of any company. Creating an account with fake information, pooled passwords, or a group account is directly addressed in the TOS at Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php " Registration Data; Account Security In consideration of your use of the Site, you agree to (a) provide accurate, current and complete information about you as may be prompted by any registration forms on the Site ("Registration Data"); (b) maintain the security of your password and identification; (c) maintain and promptly update the Registration Data, and any other information you provide to Company, to keep it accurate, current and complete; and (d) be fully responsible for all use of your account and for any actions that take place using your account. ... User Conduct In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to: - register for more than one User account, register for a User account on behalf of an individual other than yourself, or register for a User account on behalf of any group or entity; ... - use or attempt to use another's account, service or system without authorization from the Company, or create a false identity on the Service or the Site. " These TOS's have largely been unchallenged in court in this regard as far as I know (they're practically unenforceable in my opinion). I'd suggest considering whether you're willing to be the legal canary in the coal mine (yourself, and on behalf of your students). Terrell PhD Student SILS at UNC-CH
Terrell: Trust me I know all about those terms which most students routinely work around by giving parts of their names. That is part of the reason that I use Ning because you can set up a company name or an individual name. Those terms of use are primarily there to protect Facebook and advertisers from spamming,cyber-bulling, porn and more. I am not suggesting that no one break their conditions I am suggesting that students protect their identities by not providing their entire identities online for large companies that data mine and will sell, rent, lease or strategically ally )with others to get around this) your identity aware. If Facebook could get rid of all of the pseudo accounts their herd would look significantly thinner which is why there is selective enforcement for the real bad actors. Chris -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Terrell Russell Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:06 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom Heidelberg, Chris wrote:
My big question is why don't you have students create pseudo accounts to protect their identities. I use Facebook as a communications tool as well as content distribution tool.
Chris
Large unanswered social issues aside, I'd be wary of requiring/compelling students to knowingly break the Terms of Service of any company. Creating an account with fake information, pooled passwords, or a group account is directly addressed in the TOS at Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php " Registration Data; Account Security In consideration of your use of the Site, you agree to (a) provide accurate, current and complete information about you as may be prompted by any registration forms on the Site ("Registration Data"); (b) maintain the security of your password and identification; (c) maintain and promptly update the Registration Data, and any other information you provide to Company, to keep it accurate, current and complete; and (d) be fully responsible for all use of your account and for any actions that take place using your account. ... User Conduct In addition, you agree not to use the Service or the Site to: - register for more than one User account, register for a User account on behalf of an individual other than yourself, or register for a User account on behalf of any group or entity; ... - use or attempt to use another's account, service or system without authorization from the Company, or create a false identity on the Service or the Site. " These TOS's have largely been unchallenged in court in this regard as far as I know (they're practically unenforceable in my opinion). I'd suggest considering whether you're willing to be the legal canary in the coal mine (yourself, and on behalf of your students). Terrell PhD Student SILS at UNC-CH _______________________________________________ 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/
Fyi the legal force of the TOS is about to be tested in the Lori Drew prosecution (the Megan Meier suicide case) under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - one element that needs to be proved is "unauthorized access" and the prosecution's theory is that violation of the TOS made the access to Facebook's system unauthorized. Julie -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Terrell Russell Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:06 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom Heidelberg, Chris wrote:
My big question is why don't you have students create pseudo accounts to protect their identities. I use Facebook as a communications tool as well as content distribution tool.
Chris
Large unanswered social issues aside, I'd be wary of requiring/compelling students to knowingly break the Terms of Service of any company. Creating an account with fake information, pooled passwords, or a group account is directly addressed in the TOS at Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php
Great point Julie! Those TOS agreements are not written in stone as legal precedent yet,and I have been following the case and I bet that there will be a split verdict and it may well go to the Supreme Court. The President at the time of the case may impact this decision because several members are real old and ready to bail. I think companies that use TOS agreements generally have made it very one sided and in a legal contractual dispute the judge generally rules against the drafter of the contract because they executed the document and they knew what they intended to do when they wrote up the document, but TOS's are used by many companies to act punitively with little explanation or due process. Besides, my classroom groups are closed and are disbanded after the course is done unless the group were to decide to carry on! I was merely talking about research of the type that we are discussing. I will admit that Facebook's appeals system does work but they had to be outed by the Scobie case to get their system better. Chris -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Julie Cohen Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:22 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom Fyi the legal force of the TOS is about to be tested in the Lori Drew prosecution (the Megan Meier suicide case) under the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act - one element that needs to be proved is "unauthorized access" and the prosecution's theory is that violation of the TOS made the access to Facebook's system unauthorized. Julie -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Terrell Russell Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 12:06 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom Heidelberg, Chris wrote:
My big question is why don't you have students create pseudo accounts to protect their identities. I use Facebook as a communications tool as well as content distribution tool.
Chris
Large unanswered social issues aside, I'd be wary of requiring/compelling students to knowingly break the Terms of Service of any company. Creating an account with fake information, pooled passwords, or a group account is directly addressed in the TOS at Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/terms.php _______________________________________________ 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/
On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, Heidelberg, Chris wrote:
Fred:
special advisor on Facebook's board, so I am not sure whether moving your class to Ning will change anything in this age of media consolidation. I spoke to Rafat Ali, CEO of paidContent, about his recent sale for $30 million online for an interview, and he admitted that the money changes things. I think it is safe to say that Facebook and Ning will end up as strategic partners or Ning will get bought outright by Microsoft or Facebook. My big question is why don't you have students create pseudo accounts to protect their identities. I use Facebook as a communications tool as well as content distribution tool.
Building on what Terrell has said - I'm not interested in asking/compelling my students to break the rules of any site. I'm interested in courseware - not trying to make a political statement. In my opinion, Facebook's groups are well-suited for reading discussions (and not a whole lot more). Facebook allows private groups, allowing us to create a class-only board, one whose contents didn't creep into other spaces in Facebook. What I was unable to get away from was the multiple-contexts of Facebook. The network, as opposed to affordances, creates a situation where students are forced to mingle the social and academic identities. I wanted to get away from that - and Ning provides that space for now (but certainly not forever). -Fred
Chris
-----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Fred Stutzman Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 9:54 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom
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
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.) ========================================================================== Paul Jones "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." Alasdair Gray http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/ pjones@ibiblio.org NEW voice: (919) 360-7740 fax: (919) 962-8071 ===========================================================================
++ 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.)
========================================================================== Paul Jones "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." Alasdair Gray http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/ pjones@ibiblio.org NEW voice: (919) 360-7740 fax: (919) 962-8071 =========================================================================== _______________________________________________ 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
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-- Human-Centered Computing College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology www.cc.gatech.edu/~yardi
I've also been interested in exploring Facebook as a teaching tool. I recently wrote the introduction to the ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research) annual student survey, which surveys thousands of students at institutions across the US. The focus this year was SNSs. The results of the ECAR survey echoed trends we've identified here at MSU: many students are already using Facebook to support their learning, outside of instructor-structured activities. Here's a quote from the intro: In April, 2008 we asked a random sample of MSU undergraduates about educational uses of Facebook – specifically whether students had engaged in various behaviors in the six months prior to the survey (note that 96% of our respondents reported being a member of Facebook). Although only 10% of the MSU respondents said they used Facebook as part of an assigned class exercise, about half used Facebook to arrange a study group or meeting, more than half had used it to discuss classes or schoolwork and about one-third reported using Facebook to “collaborate on an assignment in a way that your instructor would like.” Most of our respondents (69%) had used Facebook to contact another student with a question related to class or schoolwork. I think these examples of peer-to-peer support are also useful to consider as we explore educational uses of Facebook and other SNSs. Nicole * * * Nicole Ellison, PhD nellison@msu.edu On Aug 21, 2008, at 8:12 PM, Sarita Yardi wrote:
++
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.)
= = = = = ===================================================================== Paul Jones "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." Alasdair Gray http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/ pjones@ibiblio.org NEW voice: (919) 360-7740 fax: (919) 962-8071 = = = = = = ===================================================================== _______________________________________________ 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
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-- Human-Centered Computing College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology www.cc.gatech.edu/~yardi _______________________________________________ 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
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* * * Nicole Ellison, PhD nellison@msu.edu
How about asking the students to go out and find people who fit the demographic profiles you are interested in researching instead of asking them to change their own profiles. First you would have to find out if those people already have Facebook accounts. If so, you could ask the students to interview those people about the ads they receive, have them collect the data and analyze it. If they don't already have accounts, the students could ask them to sign up for one to help them with their class assignment and then do the same thing with the data. It would also be interesting to ask the people to report the content of the ads before explaining to them the basis of the project in targeted advertising and then ask them: 1. if they are aware that the ads are targeted based on demographic information (? and keywords from their profile/messages/wall?) 2. if the targeted ads are more effective than the "one-size-fits-all" advertising that is so prevalent in mass media like television and newspapers 3. if they've ever acted on a facebook ad (i.e. even if the ads are more relevant because of the targeting, are they effective, or do users tune them out as noise on the page?) Hope this helps. On Thu, Aug 21, 2008 at 9:24 PM, Nicole Ellison <nellison@msu.edu> wrote:
I've also been interested in exploring Facebook as a teaching tool. I recently wrote the introduction to the ECAR (EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research) annual student survey, which surveys thousands of students at institutions across the US. The focus this year was SNSs. The results of the ECAR survey echoed trends we've identified here at MSU: many students are already using Facebook to support their learning, outside of instructor-structured activities. Here's a quote from the intro:
In April, 2008 we asked a random sample of MSU undergraduates about educational uses of Facebook – specifically whether students had engaged in various behaviors in the six months prior to the survey (note that 96% of our respondents reported being a member of Facebook). Although only 10% of the MSU respondents said they used Facebook as part of an assigned class exercise, about half used Facebook to arrange a study group or meeting, more than half had used it to discuss classes or schoolwork and about one-third reported using Facebook to "collaborate on an assignment in a way that your instructor would like." Most of our respondents (69%) had used Facebook to contact another student with a question related to class or schoolwork.
I think these examples of peer-to-peer support are also useful to consider as we explore educational uses of Facebook and other SNSs.
Nicole
* * * Nicole Ellison, PhD nellison@msu.edu
On Aug 21, 2008, at 8:12 PM, Sarita Yardi wrote:
++
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.)
========================================================================== Paul Jones "Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation." Alasdair Gray http://www.ibiblio.org/pjones/blog/ pjones@ibiblio.org NEW voice: (919) 360-7740 fax: (919) 962-8071
=========================================================================== _______________________________________________ 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
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-- Human-Centered Computing College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology www.cc.gatech.edu/~yardi <http://www.cc.gatech.edu/%7Eyardi> _______________________________________________ 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
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* * * Nicole Ellison, PhD nellison@msu.edu
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Fred: I am in agreement with you, but as a person who was a student not too long ago and my extensive gov't experience tells me that younger people especially should shield their full identities by NOT providing full names. I agree about Facebook Groups. I am seriously looking into using LinkedIn because it is more business like and it provides more privacy. I will keep you posted. You can friend me on LinkedIn or Facebook. Chris -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Fred Stutzman Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 3:02 PM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom On Thu, 21 Aug 2008, Heidelberg, Chris wrote:
Fred:
special advisor on Facebook's board, so I am not sure whether moving your class to Ning will change anything in this age of media consolidation. I spoke to Rafat Ali, CEO of paidContent, about his recent sale for $30 million online for an interview, and he admitted that the money changes things. I think it is safe to say that Facebook
and Ning will end up as strategic partners or Ning will get bought outright by Microsoft or Facebook. My big question is why don't you have students create pseudo accounts to protect their identities. I use Facebook as a communications tool as well as content distribution tool.
Building on what Terrell has said - I'm not interested in asking/compelling my students to break the rules of any site. I'm interested in courseware - not trying to make a political statement. In my opinion, Facebook's groups are well-suited for reading discussions (and not a whole lot more). Facebook allows private groups, allowing us to create a class-only board, one whose contents didn't creep into other spaces in Facebook. What I was unable to get away from was the multiple-contexts of Facebook. The network, as opposed to affordances, creates a situation where students are forced to mingle the social and academic identities. I wanted to get away from that - and Ning provides that space for now (but certainly not forever). -Fred
Chris
-----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Fred Stutzman Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 9:54 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom
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
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-- 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 _______________________________________________ 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/
On Aug 20, 2008, at 7:18 PM, Stephanie Tuszynski wrote:
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?
I like the concept, but the comments have suggested that maybe modifying live facebook pages isn't reliable or a good idea ... so I began wondering about different ways of exploring this phenomenon. - using just google, have students do some standard searches and record which ads appear. do they seem targeted? to the student? to the geographic area? to the search? to different types of google users (e.g. people who use gmail and or igoogle might be different than the people who surf "anonymously." - turn it into a mini-ethnographic survey. Each student would ask 2 or 3 of their friends to describe their experiences and perceptions with targeted ads, etc. Do they feel they are being targeted ? Do they feel that the "net knows" something about them? Is facebook different than myspace, etc ? In both of these, there would have to be some discussion about how to do this type of research, and what can reasonably be expected from it. Moreover, we're studying a moving beast. "Targeting" and "profiling" algorithms are changing rapidly - this fall's facebook will be different than next spring's, etc. Steve
I think my first reply failed; sorry if anyone gets two of them... First, I agree these ads suck as constant reminders of gender stereotypes and as destructive messages about body image. Second, in addition to opting out, participants can also actually announce what they are doing because I suspect the marketers are not also mining wall posts, status updates or messages. In fact, maybe it would be fun to get as many people as possible to delete gender and age info as a protest. I appreciate the concerns others have voiced, but since they can opt out, I think students can make an informed decision, sign a consent form and that is sufficient. They are over 18, aren't they? Also, though people do it all the time, dummy accounts are against the TOS. I'm not saying don't do it, but I think it could also carry risks, just different ones. --Any protest or action that is a little critical of a large system has some risk. That would be a great discussion topic. Please keep us posted on how it goes. Kim ps--just saw Steve's message--I still think it would be ok for students to change their profiles, but if they didn't feel comfortable and opted out, Steve's ideas make a great alternative. -- Kim De Vries http://else-if-then.blogspot.com
Steve I like this approach whether using Google or Facebook. Both are known for targeting and profiling! I actually did something similar once for a class project. -----Original Message----- From: air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org [mailto:air-l-bounces@listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Steve Cavrak Sent: Thursday, August 21, 2008 11:53 AM To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org Subject: Re: [Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom On Aug 20, 2008, at 7:18 PM, Stephanie Tuszynski wrote:
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?
I like the concept, but the comments have suggested that maybe modifying live facebook pages isn't reliable or a good idea ... so I began wondering about different ways of exploring this phenomenon. - using just google, have students do some standard searches and record which ads appear. do they seem targeted? to the student? to the geographic area? to the search? to different types of google users (e.g. people who use gmail and or igoogle might be different than the people who surf "anonymously." - turn it into a mini-ethnographic survey. Each student would ask 2 or 3 of their friends to describe their experiences and perceptions with targeted ads, etc. Do they feel they are being targeted ? Do they feel that the "net knows" something about them? Is facebook different than myspace, etc ? In both of these, there would have to be some discussion about how to do this type of research, and what can reasonably be expected from it. Moreover, we're studying a moving beast. "Targeting" and "profiling" algorithms are changing rapidly - this fall's facebook will be different than next spring's, etc. Steve _______________________________________________ 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/
participants (13)
-
danah boyd -
E. Ashley Hall -
Fred Stutzman -
Heidelberg, Chris -
Julie Cohen -
Kimberly De Vries -
Nancy Baym -
Nicole Ellison -
Paul Jones -
Sarita Yardi -
Stephanie Tuszynski -
Steve Cavrak -
Terrell Russell