Didactalab

This is my final blogging post in my Mini-Series “Teaching with Facebook”. The story so far:

• I was totally hyped after viewing the Facebook F8-Developer keynote, when Mark Zuckerberg demoed FaceBook as the new social media platform (it seems, that Mark has learned to create his own Reality Distortion Field)
• First I researched what I can do with FaceBook: FaceBook as an E-learning tool: How to support classroom teaching with FaceBook?
• I then struggled to get all my (German) students in my university realm: My first week without my students on FaceBook - some internationalization problems, I suppose, but revealing also some deeper problems about Facebook as a LCMS!
• Then we worked hard to get going: Stabilizing our course on FaceBook - I was still optimistic, but I started to loose the enthusiasm of the students, so we ended up using the Groups app without any other cool mix-ins: Working with FaceBook in a conversational course.

In the last session of the course I have been discussing our Facebook experience with my students. Here are some of the points we made:

• Because we only used a group (the Courses apps did not really work outside of the US), the tools weren’t any better than a standard LMC (e.g. stud.ip or Moodle)
• For this purpose, Facebook lacks other relationship types such as peer or faculty - I cannot become “Friends” with all of my students nor do the students want this. Which leads to another point,
• There is no social network to bind them all. Everyone has his different social contexts you don’t want to mix. Being a badass on myspace, a socializer on Facebook and a serious young professional on LinkedIn is better and easier than to put everything together. I mean, when you are going out to hit the dancefloor at Maria am Ostbahnhof you definitely look and behave differently than in a job interview, right? Jan Schmidt (sorry, in German) talked about this here in Bremen: if a social network becomes to crowded with the “boring people”, the elite will bail out and find new networks.

Using Facebook for courses may seem convenient because the students are already there, but finally I think that it doesn’t really work the way I thought it could. A part of the reasons why it didn’t work out where technical ones, but the most important ones are deeper issues. So this puts me back at the drawing board for the next semester’s courses and figuring out how to create really nice Personal Learning Environment processes with available tools. I will keep you updated about my progress.