Yep, I’m writing about facebook (sigh, I don’t think that we can ignore it). I used facebook in my class last semester with few students who were having difficulties (with uploading videos onto youtube). I know of a handful of instructors now who regularly use facebook in their WRA courses (the most successful of whom is April Baker-Bell).
Affordances:
- Students can upload movies from movie maker or imovie without them being taken down, as happens with youtube when you add content to a video that violates copyright. That violation of copyright is often instructive for the “Allowed-to-take” video that I require my students to create (“I thought I followed all copyright rules, but youtube took my video down for copyright violation”) but it makes assessing student work difficult when they create and share their “Taken” videos. Facebook makes this difficulty disappear, as I have never had movies taken off of facebook thus far.
- Students are immediately connected, even if they have never met each other before. Thus there are no excuses for not getting in touch with classmates to ask what they missed in class, get notes or meet up for group projects. The facebook chat function also makes it easier for students to get caught up with content from other classmates.
- It can make interacting with the ideas presented in class travel beyond the space of the classroom. The chat function makes this particularly true- it is very easy to chat about a discussion that was had in class, a group project, or a paper topic.
- Facebook is modern and current and students are likely to know how to navigate it. Even if students are unfamiliar with the layout and navigation of facebook, it is an incredible user-friendly navigation (my mom uses facebook, and that is saying a lot for the interface)!
- Instructors have to create an entirely new facebook presence as an instructor (or, at least in my opinion, this is the ethical/ intelligent thing to do- your personal life should be separate from your work life).
- Students must share a space that is often reserved for a non-academic presence, perhaps sacrificing their social persona which may be disconnected from their academic persona OR students must create an entirely new facebook for their student persona OR students may remain unaware of the requirement to disconnect their social activities from their academic goals (that is, no half-naked/ drunk pictures on the facebook page your instructor is going to browse to find your video or your post about class).
- The immediate connectivity could bother some students who might be uncomfortable with other students accessing their personal information (although of course these students have the option of creating a separate facebook account for the course that does not have personal information on it).
- The facebook chat function could become an additional time imposition (in terms of answering questions that may come through via this function) for instructors to make.
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