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

[E. Ashley Hall]

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 at 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 at 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 at 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 at ibiblio.org   NEW voice: (919) 360-7740     fax: (919) 962-8071
>>>
>>> ===========================================================================
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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>
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>>
>  * * *
> Nicole Ellison, PhD
> nellison at msu.edu
>
>
>
>
>
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