This article is more than 5 years old.

Giz on Facebook

  • He’s working with four classes that are using Fan pages to share information/host class discussions/etc
  • Good idea to use consistent naming principles to make it easier to locate the course pages
  • Students have to become a fan to have the information show up in their feeds
  • Professors have to have an understanding of how Fan pages work, how people use them, and be willing to experiment with the pages
  • You can get a lot of good statistics from the Fan pages
  • Professors add the announcements to the Fan pages
  • Students reply to professor posts; this has a benefit over being in a blog, because students are already there
  • There is a 430 character limit in the initial post; 840 character limit in replies

Giz on LibGuides

  • Pulls together Blackboard, Facebook, Zotero links into one places
  • Typical introduction to LibGuides in class
  • Uses How To Blog for Zotero help

Susan on Facebook and Twitter

  • Likes Facebook because you’re starting with the students are and aggregating content into one place for them
  • Started using LibGuides in her class, but moved away from that
  • All communication happens through Facebook now, except grades
  • Email + Fan page was to confusing. All in Fan page.
  • Started using Facebook group with wiki application, but then the application disappeared
  • Led to a fragmented approach: students start in Facebook, move to LibGuides
  • This last course used groups but simplified, kept discussions in Facebook
  • There is a comparison page for groups vs. pages; for example, groups can be closed
  • The South Course used Facebook pages because they needed to include video, images, discussion, and Twitter
  • Can embed HTML in markup language boxes and can choose to put in box on left side or under its own tab (using FBML)
  • The Twitter experiment didn’t work as well as they hoped. People didn’t have a way to read the others’ messages until they had access to a computer with internet again. So, it was all on-way communication.
  • If you use Flickr in a page, you can use the MyFlickr app. However, you can only add one per account, so if it’s on your page and profile, the same pictures will show up on both.
  • MyCalendar lets you add a Google Calendar. The South Course used this in lieu of a map this year. Locations were listed on the calendar entries.
  • Susan and Erik played with a lot of apps to potentially use them in the course, but settled on about five.
  • The video upload worked great, but the clips had to be 20 minutes or less
  • Students felt okay about the Fan page because it wasn’t tied to their personal pages.
  • Six of nineteen students took a survey at the end. All six liked the use of Facebook, but also felt that the video was invasive and they couldn’t be as open as they wanted
  • Will leave up until the page goes away naturally. Tried to archive with Archive It, but haven’t dont that yet.

Other notes

  • Could have a Fan page for library research
  • Facebook could be a portal to BI sessions or subject specific work
  • Should look into embedding Toolkit videos into Facebook pages
  • Have to invest in using Facebook to make it work for you
  • You can get very good stats out of Facebook

Carolyn on Google Docs

  • Using Google Docs for group work
  • Each Google Doc has 2-3 components, each group member picks 1
  • Carolyn and Bobbie put comments in the Documents, but not grades
  • This allows students to correct their work
  • ZoHo was recommended as an alternative to Google Docs