Gahhh! Students want me to join Facebook.

[PeterB]

[quote roshi]some of my students wanted me to join Facebook. It took 5 minutes and after my initial resistance, I thought it was great.
That's exactly what I'm afraid of. It's like a virus... once you've caught it, you're one of "them".

[deckeda]

My wife is now hooked on it. She notes that as easy as it is to email/text/phone someone, it's even easier to login and jot down a quick sentence there to someone. Not sure what that says about our attention span or commitments otherwise, if email/text/phone has become too much to bear.

[C(-)ris]

If it is a school group or organization I would insist on them having a website on the school servers. Facebook and myspace is not the place for an official organization of the school.

[microchip13]

so you write a facebook application that will interact with the web site you set up so that they get notifications of stuff that happens on your site.

[AlphaDog]

Hey, who's in charge?! Don't let those kids boss you around!

[PeterB]

[quote C(-)ris]If it is a school group or organization I would insist on them having a website on the school servers. Facebook and myspace is not the place for an official organization of the school.
That's a valid point, and one that I've already made to them-- it doesn't help that their student government organization is also using Facebook. As I understand it, if they are receiving money from the school (for activities, for example), they shouldn't be doing that. Also, they DO have an official school email addy. My understanding is that they *can* use Facebook, but they cannot *only* use Facebook... for example, for announcing meeting dates, etc., since not everyone is on Facebook and so therefore it's possible people might not get the announcements. As for their using it, there's nothing we can do to prevent them from doing whatever outside the school. Still, it's a legitimate point that I may bring up with one of my superiors just to see what they say. (I do know that one of my superiors, being an advisor to another school organization, flatly said "NO" to the possibility of that group's having a Facebook presence... on the other hand, again, I don't know how you would prevent it.)

[threeprong]

It seems to me that myspace is for social networking among peers.

Is a teacher's relationship with their students social or professional?

If i were a teacher, I wouldn't do it as it would simply be one more thing to monitor and the potential for an issue to come up is high, and the payoff/reward would seem to be somewhat low.

But then again.. I'm not a teacher and I'm probably completely clueless as to how teachers make the connection with their students these days.

3p

[PeterB]

threeprong ... this is Facebook we're talking about, not myspace... (not that makes SUCH a huge difference, I'm just saying, since Facebook at least seems to have as its basis the college idea of a traditional facebook) ... whereas myspace mostly seems to be for social networking amongst peers, Facebook is a little less clear-cut.

As for whether a teacher's relationship with their students is social or professional, I would say that (unfortunately) that's not a clear line either. If it were purely professional, there wouldn't really be any interaction outside the classroom or in a non-academic context, and yet that's clearly not the case ... as I see it, it's not so much about the question of social versus professional, as it is how or whether to use the technology which the students are so comfortable with, in order to connect with them. For example, I have one colleague who I discovered is posting his lectures to YouTube, and has a blog to which students can post. In general, I have not been in favor of things like that, because I'd agree that there are too many opportunities for such things to be easily misused or abused. On the other hand, at my particular institution, apparently the one key aspect that students rate above all else in their evaluations of their experience at our school is how they've interacted with their professors OUTSIDE of the classroom... that is to say, the teacher could be the best teacher in the world, but if the student hasn't gotten any impression that the prof cares about them at all outside of the classroom, then he or she is very negative about the whole experience. (This isn't surprising I guess, given how huge some classes have gotten, etc.)

[enrico7300]

Why don't they just try Yahoo Groups. Not as clique-y or cool but it still gets the job done, right? Or do they want to spend seven hours a day adding and managing "friends?"

[comaplate]

Depends on how you're going to use it. If you don't plan on having any interaction with any of your friends or anybody from your personal life, then go ahead and set it up -- but I would not recommend mixing the two worlds.

I have a Facebook account I use to keep track of a lot of my college friends, and there's no way on earth I would add any of my students to my Facebook list.