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Learn From Rogue Tweeters
7 Steps to Promoting Your Organization in Twitter

By Lisa Gualtieri / August 2009

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  • Thu, 17 Sep 2009
    Post by Tim Dalton

    We too have been looking at Facebook/etc and trying to work out how we can best make use of it. The most common objection we hear is always loosely this, about it being a distraction- whether from the educational activity you should be doing online or from what is happening in the class that you should be concentrating on. There are all sorts of debates raging about Internet filtering in UK education so I'm not going there, but it has occurred to us we could think about this in a different way.

    Rather than thinking about Facebook as being a distraction from time that should be spent learning, we've been looking at how we could get the school somehow present in the time the kids spend on there socially. So yes, having your friend list there while you should be studying might be more distracting than being logged into the school learning platform, but if our activities on Facebook were engaging enough that students would choose to visit in their free time then it has to be a good thing.

  • Sun, 30 Mar 2008
    Post by Paul Desmarais

    It is possible that in trying to exploit the popularity of the social networking activity enjoyed by teens (and, apparently over teens)to foster education you may destroy its cachet with the kids. I would also argue that while the ''distraction'' aspect of using Facebook in education is valid, privacy issues are at odds with incorporating Facebook into education. (By that I mean privacy of the students using Facebook and those who do who would rather their information was not exposed to education professionals in a school setting. For example, if you used Facebook in your class, a student would have to have a page, correct? Which would mean you were forcing them (minors) to expose personal data on the internet.) Finally, and most importantly, incorporating Facebook into an educational setting is erasing the lines between work and play. It may be that people don''t think those lines exist any more, but they do. Learning where those lines are and how to walk on the applicable side at the applicable time is part of the education process. Learning to keep work and play separate might be far more valuable in educating high schoolers than exploiting the popularity of their favorite web sites and activities for educational, and, of course profitable,purposes. (There will be advertising on the site, and the visitors internet travels will be recorded and cookies added, and maybe a spy ware program or two? That data will be mined and sold, right? For these and other reasons I think that the Biblical phrase "render unto Caesa those things that are Caesars and

  • Tue, 22 Jan 2008
    Post by DJ Boba Fett

    Please read my blog at www.myspace.com/djbobafett to see my running trials and tribulations with this site. At this point, they up and cancelled me, with over 200 hours of work on my site, pages, events, profiles and advertisements. They are billing my card even though I no longer have an account. I called the Palo Alto offices at 650-543-4800 to dispute the bill (as it''s ads for a deleted site they''re billing me for) and had to call 3 times before a human picked up. I talked to a female Sam (supposedly the only Sam that works there, yeah right) and she said they do NOT offer voice billing support. i told her that by refusing to work with me, she is okaying my choice to dispute the charges with my credit card company. We''ll see. If you have ANY problems with the site or infrastructure, please call them, ask to talk to SAM, and tell them "DJ Boba Fett sent you."

  • Thu, 03 Jan 2008
    Post by Caryl Oliver

    I loved hearing what James had to say and agree totally with using the tools that students use anyway to support delivery of learning. My concern, though, is with our preparedness as educators to be able to move with the speed required to make sure we are actually on the same wave as the students... Once mainstream media, and therefore most teachers, start to discuss Facebook or whatever, how much longer is it likely to stay cool? I work every day with teachers at all levels trying to get them to think about their teaching in a digital world in general rather than about one platform or another. If they can prepare material that is inter-active, in small files (easy download on any device) and engaging individually or for groups then they certainly can make whatever social computing phenomenon work for them and their students. But if they have to re-work it for every new platform they will never embrace any of them. What do you think?

  • Fri, 21 Dec 2007
    Post by John Thompson

    If Facebook, et al. really want to impact society (i.e., increase users and user activity), then it will need to race Google, etc. to provide the 21st century equivalent of the shopping mall - i.e., find everything (including education) at the site. Sorta like a "life portal." Tracking/participating in a ton of individual, disconnected sites is OK in the beginning, but if the Facebook sites get it right, then their content (and easy appearance/navigation) will drive traffic to their sites.

  • Sun, 16 Dec 2007
    Post by Michael Staton

    As a developer of educational tools on facebook, I completely agree with James. Students must learn to interact with others using social web 2.0 means, as well as to cope with ubiquitous distraction while being productive.

  • Sat, 15 Dec 2007
    Post by gina stefanini

    I wonder what would happen if you engaged the learners in this conversation. What if they could be part of the equation; looking at the potential (distraction) problem and helping to solve the solution. When learners (especially teens) become actively involved in the why-how-why of their learning then they are engaged and invested in learning. What if our students became so engaged in the learning and learning process (just like they are when they are on facebook for hours every night) that nothing could distract them from it? I don''t think you should lose the intensity of engagement that facebook provides but use it to engage them with learning. Just a few thoughts from an educator and a parent of teens, gina PS. You may be interested in Universal Design for Learning at Cast, org and Making Learning Visible at the Harvard University/Project Zero website. These are organizations that look at the affective side of learning, exactly what you are hitting with Facebook.

  • Fri, 14 Dec 2007
    Post by Mary Gutwein

    There is a professional website called LinkedIn where professionals like myself keep up with only professional contacts. Why couldn''t there be a specific, facebook-like site for students? The site could be limited, somehow, to educational endeavors. Just a thought.

  • Fri, 14 Dec 2007
    Post by Mark Notess

    I''ve also been thinking a lot about learning in Facebook. Certainly Facebook could be distracting. But so is sitting in a classroom full of other people. That said, my concern about Facebook as an academic platform is whether the activities for which people come to Facebook are perhaps in a different activity clump than the activities associated with academic learning--and students may well prefer keeping those clumps separate, or at least they may want to carefully manage the connection between the two. For instance, they may want to pull some of their profile information from Facebook into their CMS, but they may not want to advertise what they spent last night doing instead of writing their paper. What I am suggesting is that to call something a "distraction" may merely mean we''re trying to mix activity clumps in undesirable ways.