[Air-L] Examples of Successful Uses of Facebook in the Classroom?

Wallis, Cara cwallis at tamu.edu
Thu Aug 12 18:04:58 PDT 2010


I agree that Blackboard and such are quite clunky. I can't speak to the issue of university policies, but have a related query. I used a Ning site for the last few semesters with a course I taught on culture and technology and had quite a lot of success with it (part of the course involved discussing the privacy issues that students are already dealing with in their use of social media in their own lives outside of school). Now that Ning is starting to charge hefty fees for anything other than the most basic services I'm wondering if there is anything else out there, other than FB, that people would recommend.
cara


Cara Wallis
Assistant Professor
Department of Communication
Texas A&M University
979-862-6956
________________________________________
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of Michael Zimmer [zimmerm at uwm.edu]
Sent: Thursday, August 12, 2010 7:46 PM
To: AoIR-L
Subject: Re: [Air-L] Examples of Successful Uses of Facebook in the     Classroom?

Alex is right to question the ethics of requiring students to join Facebook in order to complete course requirements (or create a Google Account to access Google-hosted content, or similar services). There are the privacy and behavioral tracking issues, and in Alex's particular example, the students are also compelled to violate the service's terms of service by creating fake accounts.

The question is, however, what alternatives do we have as educators to best "reach" our students other than the popular social media they already use?  Blackboard and D2L are clunky and often poorly supported, so it's understandable to want to find outside sources.

Has anyone seen any university policies regarding the use of 3rd party platforms for coursework?

-michael.


--
Michael Zimmer, PhD
Assistant Professor, School of Information Studies
 (Interim Undergraduate Program Director)
Associate, Center for Information Policy Research
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
e: zimmerm at uwm.edu
w: www.michaelzimmer.org


On Aug 12, 2010, at 4:00 PM, Alex Halavais wrote:

> I've used facebook for a course, organizing pretty much everything
> through the site. This was at a time when the group functionality was
> not as fleshed out, and I wanted to be able to use RSS feeds into it,
> so I created fake "people" for the course that could be friended by
> students. (cf. http://www.flickr.com/photos/halavais/1300239816/ )
>
> While it was sort-of fine for students who already lived much of their
> lives on Facebook, it was difficult for those who had no interest in
> the site. I encouraged them to create fake personae for the site, but
> even with that, I am concerned enough by the privacy implications of
> requiring (or encouraging) students to use the site that I have
> abandoned it. And once you go through the pain have having students
> create "alts" for the site, it becomes a lot less about the course
> content and a lot more about negotiating issues of privacy on the
> platform.
>
> - Alex
>
>
>
> --
> --
> //
> // This email is
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> // Alexander C. Halavais, ciberflâneur
> // http://alex.halavais.net
> //
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