A little more on Facebook and teaching ... There is no denying that Blackboard and its ilk offer no useful tools for interacting with students. Furthermore, they seem to work pretty hard to produce software to make what they offer (as cumbersome and unhelpful as they are) worse with each iteration. Sadly, our institution is stuck with Blackboard for the foreseeable future. Students have an expectation that all courses will appear here, which is not unreasonable from their (students') perspective. Consequently, I now typically add link(s) to the actual online services we use to run courses that encourage discussion, collaborative work, sharing, etc. such as locally hosted Wikis. With regards to Facebook, I think it can depend on what type of course you are teaching and how open you want the interactions to be. For example, I teach an online communities and social media course so using and evaluating a range of online services is pretty important. Requiring that students access these tools in this context makes sense and has been pointed out in earlier responses - these situations provide ample opportunity to examine TOS issues, privacy, etc. (with the added benefit that students are likely to be there already). For other courses that do not directly examine these tools, then I usually suggest Facebook (or others) as optional places to discuss course stuff (or indeed anything else community related). I tend to favour open conversation so in this regard, Facebook fan pages are good. They are easy to setup and administer, they are open, relatively optimised for interaction (the new questions feature could be handy), flexible (in as far as Facebook is flexible) can link with Twitter to document fanpage activities (some students prefer Twitter), students can drive interactions, and they are entirely separate from the whole "friendship" (social networking) mechanism in Facebook. Having said that, I do recognise that there are implications for students' actual accounts (undesirable friendship requests, classmate stalking, activity tracking, etc.) Has anyone had negative experiences using fanpages or groups on Facebook? _________________________________________________________________ http://andrew-long.name | Department of Information Science | School of Business University of Otago | NZ | +64 3 479 8319 | mailto:andrew.long@otago.ac.nz ________________________________________ From: Michael Zimmer [zimmerm@uwm.edu] Sent: Friday, 13 August 2010 12:46 To: AoIR-L Subject: Re: [Air-L] Examples of Successful Uses of Facebook in the Classroom? Alex is right to question the ethics of requiring students to join Facebook in order to complete course requirements (or create a Google Account to access Google-hosted content, or similar services). There are the privacy and behavioral tracking issues, and in Alex's particular example, the students are also compelled to violate the service's terms of service by creating fake accounts. The question is, however, what alternatives do we have as educators to best "reach" our students other than the popular social media they already use? Blackboard and D2L are clunky and often poorly supported, so it's understandable to want to find outside sources. Has anyone seen any university policies regarding the use of 3rd party platforms for coursework? -michael. -- Michael Zimmer, PhD Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies (Interim Undergraduate Program Director) Associate, Center for Information Policy Research University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee e: zimmerm@uwm.edu w: www.michaelzimmer.org On Aug 12, 2010, at 4:00 PM, Alex Halavais wrote:

I've used facebook for a course, organizing pretty much everything through the site. This was at a time when the group functionality was not as fleshed out, and I wanted to be able to use RSS feeds into it, so I created fake "people" for the course that could be friended by students. (cf. http://www.flickr.com/photos/halavais/1300239816/ )

While it was sort-of fine for students who already lived much of their lives on Facebook, it was difficult for those who had no interest in the site. I encouraged them to create fake personae for the site, but even with that, I am concerned enough by the privacy implications of requiring (or encouraging) students to use the site that I have abandoned it. And once you go through the pain have having students create "alts" for the site, it becomes a lot less about the course content and a lot more about negotiating issues of privacy on the platform.

- Alex

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