Wednesday 19 May 2010

I'll not be leaving Facebook yet either...

Below is my Facebook profile. It's a little bit secret. If you google my name you will not find it. And if you search for me in Facebook you will not find it. My privacy settings exclude me from search. So you can only find my profile if you know one of my friends already (or you click on the link in the networked blogs widget at the side!). I've always keep my privacy settings high on Facebook. I get all green lights from the privacy scanner (http://www.reclaimprivacy.org/facebook). And yes, I have no choice but to have a public profile, but I don't mind the level of information it gives about me.
My Facebook Profile
Sarah Stewart has blogged saying that she won't be leaving Facebook on "Quit Facebook Day". She connects with many midwives there that she would not otherwise. My use of Facebooks is more personal. But in the last few days I also decided to start a Facebook page to support my teaching. I was worried that it would come across 'creepy treehouse', so I sent an email to students making clear that it would only aggregate content that they could already find through Blackboard. I don't expect this page to be interactive as I already use the walled garden discussion forums of Blackboard heavily. And this piece of work involves contact with patients so discussion on Facebook would be completely inappropriate. 

As Matt Assay has shrewdly observed, the geek elite may be moving on, but the mainstream (including me) are just settling in.

2 comments:

  1. Hi Anne-Marie, I will be very interested to see how you get on with your students and Facebook. I am currently developing a course for undergrad student midwives in BlackBoard. There are complaints that the students do not engage with BB or any of the online activities. I am wondering if we should 'take' them outside BB and into FB. What are your views?

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  2. I am not really looking for engagement on Facebook. It's just somewhere else to share any content I produce. An interestingly I see some students from the year below signing up. Of course they don't have access to the year above through Blackboard.
    If students don't engage then perhaps the activities have no meaning for them. I find it hard to sustain the level of engagement I need to give to Blackboard at this time of the year, but I don't really mind as I think it is an efficient use of my time.

    ReplyDelete

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