Facebook is a social networking site. Social Networking sites connect people. In this case, you must accept anyone you want to associate with or be associated with as a Friend. If they are not a friend, you don’t see what they are up to and they don’t see you. You can customize how you are seen and how you interact on the site.
There are distinct advantages to this site and the way it is set up. First with Nexopia and MySpace, students can publish and anyone sees them. You can set up networks, but they are not private.
Since Facebook is such a part of the culture, is it not important that students know how to act safely? The Simon Fraser University network has 19 000 members (including me). When our students graduate, should they not know how to interact safely with the other students at their potential university? The Vancouver network has 253 000 members (including me again).
I am not naive enough to believe that Facebook is perfect. I do believe that social networking is something that we should be teaching and harnessing for educational potential. Just this week, they released an add-on to share your Del.icio.us tags through Facebook.
The world that we live in and our students belong to is different than it was 30 years ago. We were all taught how to cross the street safely, how to read traffic lights, and what side of the stairs to walk up on. These seem just natural. For Digital Natives, social network is already natural.
Join Facebook and try it out. I have enjoyed touching base with old friends and current friends. Life is so busy sometimes we forget to reflect on where we have been in life. This has given me some perspective
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