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

[Steve Cavrak]

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