In our class this week, Dr. Dennen shared a paper concering Facebook and context collapse as it concerns using Facebook for education. If you are unfamiliar with the term, context collapse is what happens while using social media when your social media friends are mixed in with your real-life friends and colleagues.
The issue of context collapse is the reason why you may feel uncomfortable adding work colleagues or classmates as your friend on Facebook. For many, Facebook is a personal space where they get to share pictures of family, friends, their home, pets, etc. Many people do not feel comfortable being so personal with work colleagues, which is why many choose to not add them as friends.
As a classroom teacher, it never even occurred to me to implement Facebook as a tool. There stood to be many benefits for me to do so, especially as it concerned sharing files, videos, and creating a classroom community, but I'm sure students were just as mortified at the though of being Facebook friends with their teacher as I was thinking about them seeing pictures of my home.
From a sensible point of view, it may make more sense to reduce the number of total accounts we have and utilize single logins by only ever using Facebook. However, this is not how human beings work in a social manner. There is an inherent desire to certain people and information in our lives separate from one another, and this is why we have learning management systems and educational social media.
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When I learned Dr. Dennen wanted us to use a Twitter account for school purposes, I was a bit surprised. Given recent political happenings i...
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In our class this week, Dr. Dennen shared a paper concering Facebook and context collapse as it concerns using Facebook for education. If yo...
I was feeling that collapse and got a little weirded out about using Facebook for the classroom. I can see the benefits of FB classroom scenarios but I was happy to see we did not have to use Facebook for this class. I’m not willing to use my personal FB account so, I would have tried to make an alias account. But I’m glad it didn’t come down to that. I liked how Twitter, Google, and Instagram were way more chill about having multiple accounts. I found it much easier to use a new google account for all my social media endeavors. It’s not like I have anything to hide. It’s more that I didn’t want to blast my friends and family with posts about instructional design for 6 weeks. My decision to disassociate school and FB was more for them than for me.
ReplyDeleteI also wrote a post this week about FB limitations for education. I, personally, do not consider FB a very good choice for class environments due to the cross over in networks/communities.
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