Alarm bells were ringing even before I began to read Childs' posting to the Praxis wiki, a reading for this Tuesday's class. Based on recent press about issues of privacy on Facebook, and personal misadventures within my own family and community, I felt immediately alarmed -- is using Facebook as a classroom teaching tool to exchange information between professor and students a smart idea?
On the face of it, Childs' experience for the semester seemed to be benign. Her reason for choosing to use Facebook in the classroom was that she wished "to take rhetoric out of the classroom and locate it in their space." And indeed what better medium would intrude on students' space more than a Facebook page!
To be fair, Childs' intention was not to intrude but rather to use the site as a discussion board where students would respond to questions she posted and hopefully create "a meta-class discussion." Unfortunately, as she candidly confesses "that didn't happen." In addition, she did not get a "high degree of attendance" -- nothing beyond the required once a week posting. Apparently the only postive outcome she mentions is communications re cancelled classes and homework assignments. Not exactly on a rhetorical level.
Mulling it over, I mentioned the Childs' posting at dinner last night with my daughter and niece. One is a grad student at John Jay and the other a recent college grad. Both make use of social networking sites and are digitally literate. Both were horrified with the intrustion of professional life into personal space.
An article on the online version of the WSJ for May 19 of this year discusses the public backlash over Facebook's recent "recent changes to its policies that have limited what users can keep private, as well as embarrassing technical glitches that exposed personal data." The article goes on to say that Facebooks privacy problems are "piling up."
In a second reading for class, "The Online Divide between Work and Play" Matt Villano discusses the pitfalls of transgressing boundaries in social networking sites. The primary danger would be either public or professional humiliation either from some inadvertent remark or pictures of people behaving badly or at least inappropriately, from a professional viewpoint anyway. As Villano points out once posted on Facebook it is there forever. A fact that we all need to bear in mind.
I also thought Child's article about using FF as a rhetorical teaching tool odd. I found her class page on FF, sort of sad, however in your response to the reading you ask some valid questions about combining social networking with teaching.
ReplyDeleteI had changed my privacy settings after reading O'Neill's blog 10 Privacy Settings . . . at first I thought the change paranoid but when I read your remarks on FF privacy problems I was glad I had.
So busy with class work, up early also -- the chirping birds wake my cats! Anyway I use Facebook so rarely that I have been slow to change my privacy settings despite my posting. Now I will.
ReplyDeleteWhat tool would you think of using in a classroom setting to achieve Childs' goals of collaboration and higher attendance? Wonder if any of our teachers in class have used anything that works. Our professors in L&L always have us post to a class blog and most have us set up our own blog. And then there is a wiki page but I am not yet comfortable with that format.