An Education in Facebook
Facebook occupies a significant amount of attention in thinking about the proliferation of digital networking in everyday life and this attention now also extend to universities which have, for some years, been wrestling with the appropriateness of using Facebook (in various ways), to improve student learning. In this paper I do two things. First, I try to present a comprehensive summary of Facebook’s principal features, noting that its underlying function is to permit reciprocal exchanges of attention. Second, I review the way several academics have written about their experiences of using Facebook ‘in education’ to discern the tensions between norms of university education and this everpresent system. The main conclusions concern the way Facebook blurs boundaries between traditionally separated spaces of formal and informal education, while noting the risks involved in academic becoming part of the attention-oriented norms of contemporary social networking. Click to read more
