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

[Heidelberg, Chris]

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 at listserv.aoir.org
[mailto:air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Stephanie
Tuszynski
Sent: Wednesday, August 20, 2008 7:18 PM
To: air-l at 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



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