COMMUNITY is an important idea within Facebook supported by many of its features. It is without doubt a great tool for building a community.
Facebook allows the creation of communities via many of its features:
- You can find people (contacts)
- You can join a group/course (personal, academic, and professional networks)
- You can post an event (promotion of information and services)
- You can share resources (pictures, audio and video uploads)
COLLABORATION is another notion that seems to be sustained in Facebook. In terms of linking its features to Palloff and Pratt's concepts regarding the development of effective distance learning programs, I believe Facebook accomplishes some of these concepts.
This podcast, http://www.onlineteachingandlearning.com/blog/?p=3 where they interview PP about online courses and collaboration, PP describe some of the elements needed to achieve collaboration:
They mention, among other things, that successful online collaboration reduces isolation, students share knowledge, turns the class into a learner-centered enviroment, promotes small group activities, and real life experiences are shared.
These notions are all possible in Facebook through some of its third party applications such as:
- Email client.
- Status client.
- Groups - which permits 1-to-many messaging, discussion threads, im-like interaction.
- RSS support to import your team’s blogs (Your team isn’t blogging?), wikis, etc
- Calendar / Event app.
- Twitter app.
- Flickr app.
- News feed that tells you what people in your “friends” (your team, in our case) have done differently with their account lately.
"...This is a technology that accounts for a lot of what we might want in collaboration management..." http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/an-unlikely-free-collaboration-management-app.html
Community and collaboration...humm...maybe I am getting somewhere!
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