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

[Nicole Ellison]

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
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  * * *
Nicole Ellison, PhD
nellison at msu.edu