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

[Gabriella Coleman]

>>>
>>> I do have some concerns, of course, related to privacy issues, and I would
>>> not want students to feel that I am doing this because I want to pry into
>>> their personal lives (my goal here is not to "friend" all my students but
>>> to
>>> get them talking about statistics they see in everyday life and sharing
>>> things with each other). ?So, I'm wondering if anyone on this list has
>>> tried
>>> to use Facebook and would be willing to share what was done and how it
>>> worked, or give some tips on "best practices" for use of Facebook in an
>>> educational context.

Privacy concerns aside, Facebook is good for keeping in touch and
networking, not so much for collaboration. The best tool I have found is
Crabgrass, which makes use of social networking features, but is
foremost a tool for long distance or group collaboration:

http://crabgrass.riseup.net

You can post material, add tags, have threaded discussions, there is an
internal chat area for each group, good searching, a wiki, task list
management, and more. It has a pretty nice UI as well.

You can learn more about it here:

http://crabgrass.riseup.net/about/

The problem: to get all these features you need to download and install
the software or use their demo site, which is a bit slower than your own
install.

http://crabgrass.riseup.net/demo/

The newest version will soon be up on their hosted (they have a version
up there but it is an old version when the UI was totally different and
honestly pretty bonkers, I would not advice using it).

The upgrade will happen this fall and once their hosted site is up and
running, I will send a note. I used it once for a group project and
after that experience will use it for all my future classes. It is just
so much more interactive and user friendly than Blackboard and does not
have the privacy problems of commercial sites.

All best,
Biella

****************************************************
Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor
Department of Media, Culture, & Communication
New York University
239 Greene St, 7th floor
NY NY 10003
212-992-7696
http://steinhardt.nyu.edu/faculty_bios/view/Gabriella_Coleman