Comments on Irrelevant Facebook

• Posted by Stanley on January 4, 2010 at 5:00am EST

• I'd argue that Twitter and FB are filing different needs. FB seems to be trending more social, i.e. staying in touch with and interacting with friends in private networks. Twitter seems to be skewing more towards public information interactions and thus is a better fit for what you tend to use 'social networking' for.

• Posted by Frank on January 4, 2010 at 6:30am EST

• I think the piece identifies an important trend, but I agree with the post above that Fb is trending social or "personal business" and Twitter is trending towards public information or professional information sourcing. I would add LinkedIn as a third tool that many people use alongside Fb and Twitter.

  I think increasingly we will see highly networked people splitting their time between Fb for communicating with friends and family, LinkedIn for a professional network, and Twitter for semi-anonymous professional information sharing. Here's hoping all 3 find a business model that works. They are good tools.

• FB
• Posted by Jeff Cain on January 4, 2010 at 8:15am EST

• I don't want to beat a dead horse, but I agree with the previous posts. Facebook was not designed for educational purposes. It was educators who tried to latch on to the popularity and shape it into a teaching/learning tool. While FB has its place in academia, I have never thought that it was a good tool for classroom teaching. The popularity of that application was based on a SOCIAL foundation and trying to incorporate school/work into it made it less appealing to students......sort of like being at a college party and then the professor shows up wanting to discuss peer-reviewed literature. I will say that FB could be fill a niche role for certain classes, but overall not very useful on a broad scale. People (me included) have finally started to figure out the real power/functionality of Twitter and it does hold some promise for teaching/learning. Time will tell if adoption rates by college students give it the critical mass necessary for successful classroom use.

• Agreed
• Posted by Ktln on January 4, 2010 at 8:30am EST

• As a student, I didn't like the prospect of my University or Professors connecting me through Facebook as a learning tool. Facebook was a social place where I was able to escape school from time to time, not be reminded of it. I do agree that its relevance has declined,however. I have not yet started to "tweet", but do see it as more of an educational tool than Facebook ever was/will be.

• Let's not forget the early days of FB
• Posted by Eszter Hargittai on January 4, 2010 at 9:15am EST

• As others have noted, FB and Twitter tend to serve different functions for most people. Also worthy of note is that FB reaches a significantly larger and more diverse population than Twitter.

  But before we completely rewrite history, note that one of the first functionalities available on Facebook was Courses. I was already on the site back in 2004 so I have experiences with the various options available over time. Back then, the site served a different function for everybody - both students and faculty - and they were likely to link up unlike today (although I've personally always had a no-friending-current-students policy on Facebook, precisely because of how I use it). In the site's early years, students could easily list their courses and connect up with their classmates that way. FB got rid of this functionality presumably as it became clear that (1) students were using the site for more social purposes so that they may not want to be linking up with their profs; (2) the site expanded beyond college students and so a Courses focus wouldn't make sense to much of its emerging user base given that they weren't in school. On Aug 8, 2007, FB explained that the reason for getting rid of the Courses app was to open it up to the developer community, which makes sense, but part of what happened nonetheless was that it was no longer one of the default applications.

  The site's role in people's lives has changed over time, you can read about this in the academic literature that covers the use of social network sites

• Facebook vs. Twitter
• Posted by Halona Agouda on January 4, 2010 at 10:30am EST

• As a part-time grad student with a full time job, I find that FB can be a valuable educational tool. The people/organizations/businesses I find most interesting for the information they offer often have "fan pages" where I can get the latest updates on blog posts, interesting articles, etc. Twitter does make it easier to scan and search what interests me most, but you cannot possibly follow every tweet for every person you follow -- so it's possible to miss some items from people/organizations/businesses I want to hear from. So while I spend more time on Twitter, I continue to find value in FB in that it allows me to follow news from people/organizations/businesses I don't want to miss.

• Twitter feeds Facebook (And Tumblr)
• Posted by Cherie Dargan , Associate Professor, Communications Dept. at Hawkeye Community College on January 4, 2010 at 10:30am EST

• I was one of those people who wasn't sure what to think about Face book: I saw it as a source of competition in the computer classrooms where I taught, because many of my students seemed more intent on getting on Face book than completing their assignments. My husband, Michael, however, saw it differently; he's a librarian and intensely interested in all things web 2.0 so I decided that I had to participate to better understand the Face book phenom. I still avoid almost all of the games and surveys, because I teach online and can't spend hours on FB. However, I do enjoy the social aspects of keeping in touch with friends, family and colleagues. Twitter, in contrast, is an ideal thing for busy professionals and a great tool for sharing links of articles, thoughts, and updates. One of the options that Michael showed me was to have my Twitter updates appear on Face book: so while I don't go on Face book daily, when I go on Twitter, those comments appear on FB as well. More recently, I've used Tumblr with students as a way to keep an online journal: it's another great microblogging tool and more secure than FB, which I would never use with current students. (I do however let former students friend me!)

• Platforms will change, the underlying premise will not
• Posted by Cali Morrison , WCET at WCET on January 4, 2010 at 11:45am EST

• One thing I see missing in all of the comments and this blog post is the fact that the underlying premise, or assumption if you will, of why we (meaning higher education) got into the social media game was to provide more ways and reasons to connect faculty or institutions with students. This has many sub-purposes such as for collaborative learning or for building an affinity with students so that one day they might love our institution so much to become alumni donors.

  So, what I argue is that the platform is less relevant. Meaning that twitter, facebook, linked in, etc. will be fluid - what students use, what faculty and other education professionals use will change. (there's a great graphic from @briansolis at http://theconversationprism.com that shows the different social media platforms out there. And while it's overwhelming, I would argue that it's not even fully filled out!) I agree that in this moment in time, twittter is stronger than facebook for professional communications. I too use twitter (@wcet) as a professional communications tool and facebook as a way to stay connected to friends (some of them also colleagues) and family across the globe. However, what we need to be looking at as educational technologists, as faculty and administrators is how we can integrate the basic premise of collaborative communication and sharing in the classroom (whatever form that takes, physical, digital, etc.). Back before the "tech boom" in higher education, there was much talk about and sharing how to get students to work collaboratively without it coming down to the same situation of one person doing the work and the others signing their name. We're still working on that issue, we just have another dimension to consider now - that the students may be physically separated by hundreds or thousands of miles.

  So, yes, facebook is fading as an educational technology tool, but the question is, how will we and the corporate developers of learning management systems, create the 'space' for students to put their heads together around academic subjects? And what 'tools' (read, not platforms) will we give them to carry those collaborations out into the workplace?

• Don't comment before coffee...
• Posted by Cali Morrison , WCET at WCET on January 4, 2010 at 11:45am EST

• Lesson learned: Don't comment on an article before you finish your coffee. My Twitter address is: @wcet_info not @wcet. Although Wireless Communication Engineering Technologies Certification from IEEE (aka @wcet) is interesting for their specific audience, may not be so interesting for this audicen.

  My apologies.

• Perspective
• Posted by Bradjward , CEO at BlueFuego, Inc. on January 4, 2010 at 11:45am EST

• Perspective: The amount of people who play Farmville on Facebook is larger than the amount of people who are on Twitter.

  Facebook is not going away anytime soon. *You* may not use it more, but *you* may not be the majority either.

• Just Another Way to Keep Up
• Posted by stevenb on January 4, 2010 at 1:15pm EST

• It sounds like you are finding that Twitter is a better tool for what I'd call "keeping up" than Facebook. There's no question that those who Twitter are more likely to share a link to a new article or study, or share something they've learned that they think others will want to know. For example, the other day I tweeted the link to the hotel map and list for an upcoming convention. That's not conventional "keeping up" information, but I believe it had value to those who follow me. Anyone who wants to do a better job of keeping up would be wise to add Twitter to their keeping up regimen - as you have done. Whenever I get a new "follower" message I always check out their tweets before I reciprocate. I generally will only follow those who are using Twitter to share news and information - not just a steady stream of personal items of the type one is more likely to see on FB. That said, I would advocate that Twitter is only one tool in what should be a mixed strategy for keeping up. E-newsletters, blog feeds, web page change alerts, TOC alerts for journals, etc. are all part of an overall keeping up strategy we should all be employing in our professional lives.

• I quit Facebook
• Posted by davidm on January 4, 2010 at 2:30pm EST

• I admit to being a communication addict but I had to quit Fb because it is too welcoming of the cleverness derided above. As an instructor I don't see the value of using Fb for class--if I want to get to my students I have Blackboard email. Twitter may be useful for reminders and the like, but really how much do students need/want to hear from me?

• One size doesn't have to fit all...
• Posted by Donald Doane , CEO at ConnectYard (www.connectyard.com) on January 4, 2010 at 9:00pm EST

• Both Facebook and Twitter are excellent tools for facilitating communication, community and collaboration in their own way. In fact, I would argue that there is room for both as learning technologies in higher education. The challenge in trying to take a one size fits all approach is that it inevitably excludes/ignores the needs of some students/instructors. If I prefer Facebook, Josh prefers Twitter and someone else prefers email, shouldn't it be possible for us all to communicate via a common framework (LMS, portal, etc)? At ConnectYard we believe so and have set out to help institutions do that and more!

• Posted by 3rd year undergrad , sociology on January 4, 2010 at 9:00pm EST

• I use a combination of google reader and live bookmarks. Live bookmarks are good for news, but the glory of google reader is its shared items and public feed options. Delicious I find useful for archiving my own stuff, though I don't really use it for networking. Nothing useful is derived from facebook....

• Facebook in Higher Ed
• Posted by Lissa Lord , Librarian at KU on January 5, 2010 at 4:15pm EST

• FB is becoming my stash for articles about what I'm interested in for myself, faculty and students. Share FB and that is it. Twitter is the way I communicate with others who are interested in the same topics I am. Here is where the spot on sharing occurs. Twitter has energy and FB is a good place to put stuff.

• Tweets from twits are no match for real content
• Posted by Feynman , Resident Technoholic at WWW on January 5, 2010 at 5:15pm EST

• 140 character tweets from twits are no match for real content - on course web pages, Wikis, or Facebook.

• LMS is irrelevant
• Posted by Digeratii on January 5, 2010 at 5:30pm EST

• The subject says it all. 140 character tweets by twits will never replace the rich interactive media like facebook.

• Institutions need a Facebook presence
• Posted by Marti , Electronic Communications at Indiana University on January 7, 2010 at 4:45pm EST

• Kim is only looking at FB from the consumer's vantage point.
  

  From the publisher's point of view, Facebook is a highly valuable medium. Facebook pages for companies and institutions define the brand, like it or not. And a good communicator managing the FB page will post important and practical info for brand consumers.

  Marti