TekFest - Review of Facebook.com

Greetings Everyone,

As part of TekFest 2008, I am posting a review of Facebook.com which is a wildly popular social software application. My review is posted below. In addition, you’ll find a brief presentation further examining the features and limitations of Facebook.com as well as how it can support 21st century online learners. Finally, you’ll find a podcast interview with Professor Joan Leitchter Dominick who was an early adopter of Facebook.com and uses it as a way to support and keep in touch with students. I look forward to your comments and discussions.

Facebook.com enables people to connect with others who work, study, or live around them (2008). People of all ages use social networking sites such as Facebook.com to keep up to date with friends, family and co-workers by sharing links, photos, and information about themselves and their lives. Features of Facebook.com incorporates many of the Web 2.0 tools such as blogging features, photo sharing, news feeds to track changes to pages, instant messaging and chat, as well as a marketplace which allows users to post free classified ads. In 2007, Facebook.com launched Facebook for iPhone and in less than 1 year, there are 1.5 million active users (Facebook.com, 2008). This level of popularity clearly indicates that people want to utilize technology to support socialization.

Due to the integrated features offered through Facebook.com to keep members connected, it remains a wildly popular site. In fact, Facebook.com is the 6th most trafficked website in the world and the 2nd most trafficked social media site in the world. But according to Comscore, Facebook.com hosts the number 1 photo sharing application in the world with more than 14 million photos uploaded daily (Comscore, 2007).

However, the use of social software sites such as Facebook.com have come under fire in recent years by concerned parents and activists who are concerned about the ability to keep inappropriate material out of the hands of minors and about access such sites offer for internet predators.

Learning in the 21st century is shifting from a constructivist pedagogy to a connectivist pedagogy with the explosion of social networking tools such as Facebook.com that are currently available. McLoughlin & Lee argue that such tools including social networking spaces can “support and encourage informal conversation, dialogue, collaborative content generation, and knowledge sharing, giving learners access to a wide range of ideas and representations” (2008, ¶4). Isn’t this level of higher order thinking what we expect from our learners?

Using Social Software in Online Learning - TekFest 2008 Presentation

Podcast Interview about Facebook.com