A d c o l o g

While self-contained social networks like NING are becoming fairly well trusted in education, there are examples of people wanting to use major online networks like Facebook.  While these don’t automatically endear themselves to education, their massive uptake means that, as a tool of communication, promotion and accessibility they have an important role to play.  If you have a class, you may well set up a nING network.  But for finding new students, sharing best practice etc, it seems like a bad idea to have yet another network to join when everyone is already using facebook, myspace or one of the other major social networking players.  Having to check through countless networks can be tedious enough to render them ineffective.

However, when you start talking about using facebook for work there are all kinds of worries about privacy.  We don’t all want our data available to everyone, especially colleagues, managers and even, in some cases, students.

One way round this is to use a facebook group or page, which keeps a distinctive distance between your profile and the other facebook user.  This might work well for interacting with students – you can’t see their profiles, but can message them or provide information.  MySpace also has groups for this purpose.

However, where a more social network is required, say to share best practice between peers, adding people as “friends” becomes inevitable.  However, privacy need not be so much of a concern.

This page gives a great run-down on facebook privacy and the many settings available to you to control who sees (and more importantly doesn’t see) what.  It is well worth a read.