Post #3 Reflections

One thing is clear after reading about the use of Facebook in Higher Ed: There is still much to do in terms of discovering how this tool fits in learning/teaching at the Higher Ed level.

Some professors seem to be using the tool itself as a research topic: how do young people communicate/meet today?, how are the features in Fb being used?, what are college-age students doing with Fb?, what about privacy issues?, etc.

A few faculty appear to have integrated Fb into the classroom in innovative ways: using it as a CMS, gathering and analyzing data, and advertising course-related events.

Fb itself is trying to facilitate this integration by developing some relevant applications.
The "Courses" tool, according to its developers, is describrd to Display your courses on your profile for college or high school, find classmates, manage your schedule and assignments, create discussions, post notes, and form exclusive study groups. Welcome to Courses on Facebook.
http://www.facebook.com/install.phpapi_key=1c1cfdfaac3f4492e0034196de2125ff&canvas=true

I found that many students even though they do not want us to invade their "social space" do not mind attending a class where Fb is the main subject/topic of the course.
Stanford University, for example offered such a course and students could not wait to sign up!
This Youtube video showcases this class: http://youtube.com/watch?v=RwpGcfAV9fQ&feature=related

I tend to agree with Dr. Jennifer Golbeck, an Assistant Professor in the Collge of Information Studies, at the University of Maryland who uses Fb in her teaching and plans to continue using it, when she states:
...anyone considering using Facebook or a virtual environment in their class should use it themselves, actively, for several months before the class starts. It is important to be familiar with all the issues, features, and possibilities of the tool you are using. You also should be sensitive to the learning curve and privacy concerns of students. For example, I would never use Second Life for students, because it requires them to learn a lot of new things that have nothing to do with the course material. Facebook, on the other hand, allows them to put in just their name and nothing else, hide their personal information, and work in a very familiar online environment. Finally, teachers should keep in mind that they are borrowing technology from Facebook or another virtual environment. It is not designed around them, and their interests are secondary to the primary purpose of the site. It should be used for the features it brings by default and not forced to support other needs of the class. That's what course management software is for.
http://www.cte.umd.edu/teaching/newsletter/2007-08/Feb_March_HTML/Facebook.htm

Post #3 How is Facebook being used in Higher Ed?

Teaching a course using Facebook:
Brian Smith, a Penn State Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Technology and Education created a group on facebook.com that includes him, his teaching assistant, and students enrolled in the class, which meets in person each week. Members of the group are able to post assignments and announcements on the board. The group is visible to all facebook.com members, however only members of the group are able to view class discussions. Facebook.com’s mobile feature sends text messages to his cell phone when students send messages through its internal system or post to his “wall.” If there is an emergency, or a student asks an important question, he is able to respond while standing in the middle of the grocery store or an airport security line.
http://www.ed.psu.edu/news/smithfacebook.asp

Facebook to take over Stanford classroom:
The course is called: Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook. It is offered in the Computer Science Department. Students build applications for Facebook, then gather and analyze detailed information about how Facebook users actually use them. Students focus on using detailed numerical measurements to guide software iterations, just like developers do on thousands of existing Facebook applications. BJ Fogg, one of the instructors of this course, hopes to use the course to produce a curriculum that other computer science, business and design instructors can model their own classes after.
http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/10/facebook-to-take-over-stanford-classroom/

Faculty research:

1. Scholars at Carnegie Mellon used the site to look at privacy issues.


2. Researchers at the University of Colorado analyzed how Facebook instantly disseminated details about the Virginia Tech shootings in April.


3. Sociology, psychology and political science scholars examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say.


4. Social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement.


5. Eliot R. Smith, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, and a colleague received a grant from the National Science Foundation to study how people meet and learn more about potential romantic partners. “Facebook was attractive to us because it has both those kinds of information,” Professor Smith said.


6. S. Shyam Sundar, a professor and founder of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Penn State, has led students in several Facebook studies exploring identity. One involved the creation of mock Facebook profiles. Researchers learned that while people perceive someone who has a high number of friends as popular, attractive and self-confident, people who accumulate “too many” friends (about 800 or more) are seen as insecure. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/style/17facebook.html?pagewanted=print

Communication and data gathering tool:
"...one instructor uses Facebook as a publicity vehicle for his study-abroad trips (Lemuel 2006). Another uses it as a venue for advertising events and then gives students an assignment asking them to analyze the site (Silver 2006). A third finds it a useful tool for screening potential undergraduate teaching assistants (Mick La Lopa, e-mail to author, November 2, 2006).
Instructors might not yet be embracing social networking sites as teaching or learning tools, but they are using them as communication and information gathering tools.
http://csdtechpd.org/file.php/1/moddata/glossary/4/26/Is_Education_1.0_Ready_for_Web_2.0_Students-.pdf

Team projects: analysis of a website:
David Silver, a professor of Media Studies at the University of San Francisco assigned his students a series of projects using Facebook: "the final project encouraged students to go beyond academic writing and instead build projects -- facebook experiments with identity, facebook experiments with photo albums, facebook experiments with offline events."
"the project was smart. the nine students: a) assembled a list of dream features for facebook, b) asked the rest of us to rank them in terms of what we want to see/use on facebook, and c) designed a detailed print package describing five new features. and then, d) they sent the package to the headquarters of facebook."
http://silverinseattle.blogspot.com/2006/03/folks-at-facebook-seem-pretty-cool.html

Facebook spreads charity:
University of Massachusetts at Amherst freshman Andrew Leavitt has something in common with software creators and advertising professionals - a growing recognition of the marketing power of social networking websites such as Facebook.
more stories like this
A fund-raising veteran of Leavitt discovered last year that Facebook is a far more effective marketing tool for his charitable events than fliers and word of mouth. And his experience is quickly being affirmed by other local youth with social causes.”
http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/12/30/facebook_spreads_charity_word/

Young Victoria BC man attempting the impossible?
Dane Low is using the Facebook group "Facebook for Education in Developing Nations" to collaborate and raise $17000 to build a school in Vietnam through Room to Read and the Fundraising site. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FFKUU1LFQE





Nicholas Christakis, a Harvard professor who is using Facebook to study how people form social relationships, said, “Our predecessors could only dream of the kind of data we now have.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/style/17facebook.html?bl&ex=1198040400&en=5041e607dad7dce7&ei=5087%20

Biblioghraphy:
Eldon, E. (2007, September 10). Facebook to take over Stanford classroom. Retrieved March 2008, from Venture Beat: http://venturebeat.com/2007/09/10/facebook-to-take-over-stanford-classroom/

Low, D. (2007, November 28). Young Victoria BC man attempting the impossible? Retrieved March 2008, from YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FFKUU1LFQE

McGraw, K. (2006, September). Penn State Professor Will Use Facebook.com to Teach Class. Retrieved March 2008, from Penn State: http://www.ed.psu.edu/news/smithfacebook.asp

Rathi, R. (2007, December 30). Facebook spreads charity word. Retrieved March 2008, from Boston.com: http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2007/12/30/facebook_spreads_charity_word/

Rosenbloom, S. (2007, December 17). On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data . Retrieved March 2008, from The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/style/17facebook.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin

Silver, D. (2006, March 30). The folks at facebook seem pretty cool . Retrieved March 2008, from silverinseattle.blogspot: http://silverinseattle.blogspot.com/2006/03/folks-at-facebook-seem-pretty-cool.html

Thompson, J. (2007, April/May). Is Education 1.0 Ready for Web 2.0 Students? Retrieved March 2008, from Innovate, Journal of Online Education: http://www.innovateonline.info/index.php?view=article&id=393

Post #2 Reflections

Post #2 introduces the features that Facebook offers.

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!

Post #1 Reflections

Facebook fits so well within the natural makeup of the net generation (today's student).

It seems to feed right into their needs: social connections (peer search, personal profiles, mood updates, mini-feeds, etc); resource sharing (pictures, interest groups, events, My Questions app.); instant feedback and gratification (gifts, pokes, the wall); job/professional connections (job market, resume posting).

According to Reynol Junco and Jeanna Mastrodicasa (2007) in their book: Connecting to the Net.Generation: What Higher Education Professionals Need to Know About Today's Students, they found that in a survey of 7,705 college students in the US:
97% own a computer
94% own a cell phone
76% use Instant Messaging.
15% of IM users are logged on 24 hours a day/7 days a week
34% use websites as their primary source of news
28% own a blog and 44% read blogs
49% download music using peer-to-peer file sharing
75% of college students have a Facebook account
60% own some type of portable music and/or video device such as an iPod.
http://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Generation_Y

The next step would be to determine how/if Facebook features can/do apply to learning and teaching. Should it be left alone (outside of the classroom) as another social networking tool or does it have the potential to become a useful classroom tool?

Mark Zuckerberg himself explains why he developed Facebook:
When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we've seen is because of these basic principles.
http://kairosnews.org/facebook-furor

I believe his basic premise could be transferred into the pedagogical ideas of collaborative learning and resource sharing.

Post #2 Features

FEATURES:

The Wall
The Wall is a space on each user’s profile page that allows friends to post messages for the user to see. One user’s wall is visible to anyone with the ability to see their full profile, and different users’ wall posts show up in an individual’s News Feed. More private discourse is saved for Messages, which are sent to a person’s Inbox, and are visible only to the sender and recipient(s) of the Message, much like email.In July 2007, Facebook allowed users to post attachments to the wall, whereas previously the wall was limited to textual content only

Photos:
One of the most popular applications on Facebook is the Photos application, where users can upload albums of photos, tag friends, and comment on photos.

Gifts:
Some of Facebook’s gifts, as displayed in the website’s gift shop.In February 2007, Facebook added a new gift feature to the website. Friends could send “gifts” — small icons of novelty items designed by former Apple designer Susan Kare — to each other by selecting one from Facebook’s virtual gift shop and adding a message. Gifts given to a user appear on the recipient’s wall with the giver’s message, unless the giver decided to give the gift privately, in which case the giver’s name and message is not displayed to other users.

Marketplace:
In May 2007, Facebook introduced the Facebook Marketplace allowing users to post free classified ads within the following categories: For Sale, Housing, Jobs, and Other. Ads can be posted in either available or wanted format. The market place is available for all Facebook users and is currently free.

Pokes:
Facebook includes a “poke” feature which allows one user to send a “poke” to another. According to Facebook’s FAQ section on the Poke Feature, “a poke is a way to interact with your friends on Facebook. In principle this is intended to serve as a “nudge” to attract the attention of the other user. However while many Facebook users, as intended, use the feature to attract attention or say hello, some users construe it as a sexual advance. This interpretation of the feature inspired a popular Facebook group titled “Enough with the Poking, Lets Just Have Sex”, which, as of December 2007, has more than 340,000 members.

Status:
The “status” feature allows users to inform their friends and the Facebook community of their current whereabouts and actions. Facebook originally prompted the status update with “User name is…” and Facebook users filled in the rest. However, on December 13, 2007, the requirement to start a status update with “is” was removed, and all status updates read “User name …” Status updates are noted in the “Recently updated” section of a users’ friend list.

Events:
Facebook events are a way for members to let friends know about upcoming events in their community and to organize social gatherings. Events require an event name, tagline, network, host name, event type, start and end time, location & city, and a guest list of friends invited. Events can be open, closed, or secret. When setting up an event the user can choose to allow friends to upload photos, video, and posted items.

Applications:
On May 24, 2007, Facebook launched the Facebook Platform, which provides a framework for developers to create applications that interact with core Facebook features. Even games such as chess and Scrabble are available. As of December 5, 2007, there are more than 10,000 applications. Third-party websites such as Adonomics, which provides application metrics, and blogs such as AppRate, Inside Facebook and Face Reviews have sprung up in response to the clamor for Facebook applications.On July 4, 2007, Altura Ventures announced the “Altura 1 Facebook Investment Fund,” becoming the world’s first Facebook-only venture capital firm. On August 29, 2007, Facebook changed the way in which the popularity of applications is measured, in order to give more attention to the more engaging applications, following criticism that ranking applications only by the number of users was giving an advantage to the highly viral, yet useless applications. Tech blog Valleywag has criticized Facebook Applications, labeling them a “cornucopia of uselessness.” Others have called for limiting third-party applications so the Facebook “user experience” is not degraded. Primarily attempting to create viral applications is a method that has certainly been employed by numerous Facebook application developers. Stanford University even offered a class in the Fall of 2007, entitled, Computer Science (CS) 377W: “Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook”. Numerous applications created by the class were highly successful, and ranked amongst the top Facebook applications, with some achieving over 3.5 million users in a month.

FaceBook Video:
During the time that Facebook released its platform, it also released an application of its own for sharing videos on Facebook. Users can add their videos with the service by uploading video, adding video through Facebook Mobile, and using a webcam recording feature. Additionally, users can “tag” their friends in videos they add much like the way users can tag their friends in photos.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Site_features


Bibliography:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook#Site_features. (2008, March 5). Retrieved March 2008, from wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_features

Post #1 What is Facebook?

WHAT IS IT?

A social networking website, launched on February 4, 2004. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg, a former Harvard student.Initially the membership of Facebook was restricted to students of Harvard College. It was subsequently expanded to MIT, Boston University, Boston College, and all Ivy League schools within two months. Many individual universities were added in rapid succession over the next year. Eventually, people with a university (e.g .edu, .ac.uk, etc.) email address from institutions across the globe were eligible to join. Networks were then initiated for high schools on February 27, 2006 and some large companies. Since September 11, 2006, anyone 13 or older may join. Users can select to join one or more participating networks, such as a school, place of employment, or geographic region. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

Here is a link to a an interview with the creator of FaceBook, Mark Zuckerberg (he is only 23 years old!)

Part 1- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cEySyEnxvU
Part2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CGF00VIxB8&feature=related


Bibliography:
wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook. ( 2008, March 11). Retrieved March 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia