[Air-L] question about use of Facebook in classroom

[Stephanie Tuszynski]

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