Thursday, October 18, 2007

Facebook and academia

There's an article in the Independent about students' use of Facebook and other social networking sites. Go away and read it before continuing. [Unfortunately you can't any more, as the Indy has either moved it or deleted it.]

A few observations occur to me:

1) There seems to be an awful lot of "OMG! The students are doing something that we don't control!" Yes, of course they are. They have their own lives, and universities do not own them 24/7. Get over it.

2) "[M]ost [sixth-formers hoping to go to university] ... resented the idea that [social networking sites] might be invaded by academics." This is hardly a surprise. Most sixth-formers think of academics as being just like school teachers. Ask the same question to a bunch of first-year undergraduates, who have had time to learn that there's a difference, and you might well get a different answer.

That said, of course certain spaces within social networks are student spaces (though not, of course, Facebook itself - students have no more right to ownership of that than any other section of the population), and tutors should not barge in there uninvited. There are a couple of online student fora I read, and occasionally contribute to - but I'm very careful what I do or do not say, and not to assert any authority. And there are some areas within those fora into which I won't go. (As a result, I have apparently acquired a reputation as someone who is terribly helpful. But then these are OU students, who are different from the normal run of 18-22 year old undergraduates.)

3) "Because students are going on to Facebook and using it with their friends, there is informal learning occurring and students may be blocking certain people out of this." Yes. So what? If a subset of students go down the pub and talk about their lecture, there's informal learning going on, excluding those who aren't there. Should universities be insisting that students only go in the pub as a full group? (Difficult in a course with 100 + students, I'd have thought.) If a student reads a book not on the reading list, there's informal learning going on, from which all their fellows are excluded. An individual learning experience cannot be micro-managed in this way. Again, get over it.

4) "Facebook owns the material on the site, including teaching notes and, potentially, research, says Lawrie Phipps, manager of the users and innovation programme at JISC." Yeah, this just isn't true. Looking at the terms of use, by putting User Content on the site, you grant Facebook a license to distribute that content. You do not give them ownership, and should you choose to remove your content, the distribution license expires immediately (this is explicitly stated). That seems to me to place the ownership and control of the User Content fairly firmly in the hands of the person who created that content. I have, for instance, more control over content in Facebook than I have over some articles I've published in academic journals.

5) "I'm on Facebook and I have a laugh with friends ... But, if it comes to academic work on Facebook, it's totally inappropriate." Twaddle. You can make academic use of Facebook, as I do, to network with other academics - academic networks are social networks too, you know.

6) "Students are using these social-networking sites, and they often appear less keen on using the virtual learning environment. In fact, [Jo Fox] suspected, the popularity of one was leading to her increasing lack of success in getting interactions going in the other." Again, is this a surprise? Students who are unresponsive in seminars may become very animated once down the pub. Worrying about what students are doing outside of class isn't a productive use of time.

The people who really wish this wasn't the case, of course, are the university administrators pushing Virtual Learning Environments, in the hope that it will enable them to stop worrying about scruffy lecture halls that eat all that maintenance budget. They don't want to be told why this will not work, and think that if only the students weren't distracted by Facebook, students would put all their energies into the university-approved VLE. It doesn't work like that. Don't get me wrong, I think the VLE can bring much (particularly in an institution like the OU). But it isn't a magic solution to all problems, and needs to be treated as a supplement to other parts of the learning experience, not a substitute.

4 comments:

CariadBach said...

Tony, informal learning is great - so long as it does not start to go down paths which would be detrimental to the student. For example, if I were to start swearing blind in a student forum that Suetonius was an impartial judge of character and Graves an impartial translator (and people believed me), there could well be trouble ahead. That said however, this sort of self-induced misdirection can no more be controlled in that pub than it can be in cyberspace.

Your comment about 'Students who are unresponsive in seminars may become very animated once down the pub' is very true. I don't consider myself to be particularly unresponsive in seminars, but I am certainly louder in the pub or online. Interacting online can remove a number of impediments to debate and to the extent that people are able to use the interface and argue coherently, creates a level playing field. As a youngish student I'm sometimes a little overawed in debates in person when I feel that I am looked down upon on account of my age (however it may appear to anyone seeing me debate in person). Online I can say what I want to who I want and unless I volunteer information, all they can tell about me is that I am female. I have chosen to put my picture in Facebook and a résumé on the University site I use, but I had the choice not to do either of those things.

Of course, people also have the choice to post or not to post items of research or notes. With regard to ownership / sharing rights of online material, I see the problem being that regardless of who owns what, if the users of these sites put up research or notes without being savvy enough to tweak security settings to behave as they want them to, there could be more sharing going on than was intended. If we take myself as an example (not that I have anything particularly important loaded onto Facebook); it took me a while to realise that my profile and anything contained in it was available to anyone on the London network which I had joined. Anyone at all - I have no control over who joins the network (and I certainly don't know even 1% of the people in there). It took a fair amount of tweaking to get my security settings right, and I am fairly computer literate. I think that there needs to be a higher level of awareness of security on these sites - they're perfectly safe so long as users have the knowledge of how to make the security settings work for us.

I think being careful not to assert any authority in these online student fora is a good idea for academics / tutors in studenty areas of cyberspace. Your reputation as 'someone who is terribly helpful' is not tainted with any suggestion of your being overbearing and I believe it is *because* you provide help but are careful in this way. There ARE some tutors (whose names I will not mention here) who are known for coming across as domineering.

The VLE is a great idea - but I think there will always be problems because no one likes to repeat themselves. Of course, there is always cut and paste!

Tony Keen said...

Of course informal learning is a good thing - I wouldn't for a moment say otherwise. My comment was on the notion that informal learning can somehow be policed in anyway. Yes, misapprehensions can arise. But the proper place to correct those is when the students come into class and say "Somebody said on Facebook that ..." It's not the job of universities to go into Facebook and correct the misapprehensions at source, even if it were possible.

pangloss said...

The people who really wish this wasn't the case, of course, are the university administrators pushing Virtual Learning Environments, in the hope that it will enable them to stop worrying about scruffy lecture halls that eat all that maintenance budget. They don't want to be told why this will not work, and think that if only the students weren't distracted by Facebook, students would put all their energies into the university-approved VLE. It doesn't work like that.

Absolutely. I am currently dithering whether to set up a Facebook group for my IT law classes or rely on the forum in Blackboard. I know which I find more attractive :) The only downsides of the FB route are (a) I don't want to madnate studnts join it, which I can do for Blackboard as we post handouts there and (b) I think I will have to set up a visible bland second FB account (since I do not want my students to acces my entire social life - acdemics have lives too :) and if you only use one email addres habitually, as i do, that is not trivial as FB do not encorage multiple identities (quite understandably given their business model).

Brian Kelly said...

I also read the Independent article and had some concerns over some of the comments which were made.

I've made a number of comments about Facebook in my UK Web Focus blog.

And I'm running a day's workshop on Exploiting The Potential Of Blogs and Social Networks Workshop on 26 November in which we'll try and address some fo the concerns which have been raised.

I'd welcome suggestions on topics which might be worth raising in the discussion groups.

Brian Kelly, UKOLN