There’s an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education “Go Where the Students Are: Facebook” that urges educators to ditch Blackboard or Moodle and take class discussion to Facebook. When someone in their 40’s says they know where teenagers are on the Internet or what their online behavior is like, pause, and do some research by asking teenagers what they use and why. It makes sense to use the tool that works the best. Escape the LMS by all means. But Facebook? Perhaps one should move to Tumblr instead. Using technology requires adaptation. Invest too much in time and infrastructure and the pain may be too great to move. Better to be a digital nomad than a resident of Second Life.
Have you left the Learning Management System? Where do you think your students are online?
Facebook is a terrible resource for posting links, which inevitably will come into a class discussion. Links do not go directly from Facebook — they rewrite them through their cgi in order to track where you go when you click. As they do this, they inevitably corrupt the sort of complex links an instructor might share to resources with a course management website, a subscription article database, or HathiTrust, for instance (I see a fair number of the latter).
I have certainly done this sort of thing on Facebook with my college-aged nieces and nephews (they go to/graduated from fine schools with fine libraries with no doubt friendly and helpful librarians, but they’d rather ask their aunt half a country away from them). Ineveitably we’d have to move to email. So why not start out with something that will better serve all your needs?
Great comment, Chris! I hadn’t thought about it from the perspective of link corruption.
What’s wrong with being a resident of Second Life? Check out what we do there:
– cheers. Otherwise, there’s no way LMS can keep up. But Facebook’s not here to stay either.
This is something we at Jorum (www.jorum.ac.uk) are extremely interested in. We are the UK’s national repository for Open Educational Resources and we are keen to encourage student interaction and the act of sharing materials. If anyone has any ideas, or words of wisdom on how we can tap into the student community, it would be appreciated. After all sharing is good!