facebook and myspace

This forty-minute podcast of the panel discussion, "Social Software in Higher Education: Isolated Accidents or the Start of Something Big?", was recorded at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Annual Conference. There is also a PowerPoint available for this session.

Blogs, wikis, and networking tools appear to be gaining widespread acceptance. How are higher education professionals using social software tools in their practice? Is there any convergence with what students using them bring to the institution? This podcast features a panel exploring these questions and trying to determine if there are international differentiators.

The discussion participants include:

On Friday, the Chronicle featured an article (Emergency Alerts via Facebook and MySpace are New Ways to Reach Students, 8/22/08) on how some campuses are looking for ways to use Facebook (FB) and MySpace as tools for transmitting emergency information. On the surface, this seems like a good idea. It would seem that almost every student nowadays is plugged into FB or MySpace, and young twenty-somethings are increasingly finding news about people, friends, and family with the social networking sites (myself being no exception).

Ning is an online service where users create their own social networks and join and participate in other networks. No technical skill is required to set up a social network, and there are no limits to the number of networks a user can join. The 7 Things You Should Know About Ning, EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative’s (ELI) latest brief in the monthly series, examines how Ning allows instructors to use social networks in a neutral setting to help facilitate a strong sense of community among students and encourage personal interactions that can lead to the creation of new knowledge.

Browse the complete 7 Things You Should Know About… monthly series.

An interesting experience from the classroom:

Most of us beyond our early '20s use a term, social networking, to identify activities that have become second nature to Web 2. In a class I determined that I would introduce some scholarly social networks in order to expand their comprehension of social networking.

Luckily, I began by asking "what is social networking?" The class was large and students are often shy about speaking in front of many people. I repeated the question. No raised hands were evident. I changed the question. "How many of you do not know what social networking is?." Now I saw many raised hands.

I pursued the top a bit asking if they knew about or used Facebook, MySpace, or other sites that joined hundreds or thousands of people in communication. Most students participated in social sites.

Suddenly I realized what was happening. My students had been using social networking as a normal and  frequent activity. They were social networking as a matter of course and never needed to be told what we older folk needed a term to comprehend the activity.

NPR's Andy Carvin recently joined Talk of the Nation to cover social networking and sites like Facebook and MySpace. During the recording, they covered a number of issues related to their use in education.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14993512

First Monday is starting up a new series of podcasts. The current recording features an interview with Ian Bogost about his new book, Persuasive Games. Next up is Siva Vaidhyanathan ... I was forwarded a preview of the very interesting recording, but they haven't linked it up yet.

http://www.firstmonday.org/podcasts/

In this 53-minute recording from the 2007 EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative Annual Meeting, we'll hear from Tracy Mitrano in a session entitled Youth, Technology and Privacy. Mitrano will share anecdotes and interviews from traditional-age college students to delve deeper into the issue of privacy in a digital age. She'll ask, "Are expectations of privacy different between students and administrators?" And, if so, what implications do these new definitions of privacy have for university regulations and public policy?