To Facebook or not to Facebook?

My husband regularly spends time on Facebook, and keeps encouraging me to join. My brother recently emailed about a trip that he took, and I mentioned to my husband that I was looking forward to seeing the pictures from the trip. My husband chimed in that he had already seen the trip pictures, as well as the ones of my niece and nephew dressed for Halloween. What? I hadn’t seen any Halloween pictures. When did I get so out of touch with my own family? Am I really missing out by not belonging to Facebook?

Ultimately, I am curious about the balance of personal and professional use with these social networking sites. My dilemma is that if I set up a Facebook page, I would want it to be primarily a “personal” page for keeping in touch with family and friends. So then the question becomes, what about my students? What happens if/when one of them wants to be my “friend?” Even though I disclose some information to students in my classes, I wouldn’t want them to have full access to pictures of my family or my recent vacation. But then again, if I exclude students from my social network, am I missing out on the educational possibilities of social networking?

The subject of Facebook use in academic situations has been covered several times on the Chronicle of Higher Education discussion forums (such as this thread here, and there has been research examining whether Facebook (or other social networking sites) helps improve student community, retention and recruitment (such as these two studies, here and here).

One of the positive aspects of including students in your social network involves being able to model the appropriate use of a social networking profile. Students might not realize that information they post could someday come back to haunt them in a professional context. A recent example of this is the MySpace debacle in which a 25 year old student teacher was denied her teaching degree for posting a picture of herself as a “drunken pirate” at a party (see a story here). I think about this as the “Grandmother test:” if you wouldn’t want your Grandmother (or other family member) to see the information, then it does not belong online. Another potential educational use of Facebook is to set up groups of students for a particular class, or to encourage students to join school groups, or other groups relating to the course subject matter. The use of these groups would help build community and aid in communication with students. Finally, perhaps one of the most important reasons to get involved with sites like Facebook is that they will likely become a more mainstream (and eventually “mandatory?”) means of communication, much as email is today.

As for me, well, my curiosity has been piqued, and I think I’ll give it a whirl. I’ll let you know how it goes.

– Gail E. Krovitz, Ph.D. –
Senior Academic Trainer & Consultant