I was reading a recent article in Innovate about using Facebook in the classroom. I really like this idea because Facebook is popular with students and might make it easier for them to interact with each other in a familiar and meaningful way. Instead of, for example, interacting in a forum where their responses for the most part get lost in cyberspace never to be read again when the course is over.
But everyone recognizes the futility of forums in online education, right? right? mmm, well anyway, blog too are problematic: as useful as I’ve found them in my courses over the past three years they have serious limitations. The first of these is, many of my students have their own blogs while those who don’t are either completely new to it but interested in it or completely new to it and not interested in it. I get occasional complaints about privacy concerns, how some never asked to take a blogging or writing course, and so forth. Students who are experienced often have customized blogs with readership on blogging platforms my newbies are not using. Thus they tend not to comment on each others’ blogs as some still require you to sign up for an account with them in order to comment. My newbies are not interested in signing up for more than they have to.
Second, it’s a struggle just to get them to read each others’ blogs, let alone form a community of interest or practice. I find most of my students blogs go virtually unread by the other students despite my prodding. And, when the class is over they usually just let their blogs sit idle, eventually to die in the giant Google Blogger trash dump, thus ultimately rendering their posts and comments as meaningless as if they had used a forum. So really I wonder to myself why even bother teaching them to blog in the first place?
Finally they just aren’t that exciting as blogs yearn to be customized for writing style and look and feel and many students simply do not have the time or inclination to improve their blog writing or the appearance of the blog itself. I’m usually lucky if I can even get my students to format their blog posts in a readable way. Given that my courses are not ABOUT blogging it seems a bit of a waste of both mine and the students time.
After having read that article about using Facebook I’ve decided to give that a spin. I think I might try and create a Facebook group for my summer semester students for my new Windows users course. Will use as a pilot and see how it goes. Finally, I’ll let you know the results when I have them.