est that ES2007 students were highly appreciative of the way that the Facebook page allowed them to take an active role in their learning: by sourcing and uploading relevant article and video links, by accessing and reviewing the links provided by their classmates, by expressing their opinions on information provided and the views of others that they had engaged via the Facebook wall, by interacting with others from the course community, and by having an opportunity to reflect on their learning.
Challenges in Using Facebook
Asking students to participate in a set of tasks based on a social media platform such as Facebook does pose some potential challenges. One of those is that students may feel that this particular requirement of their coursework is overlapping too closely with their private cyberworld, especially since Facebook is such a popular socializing site for so many of them. In fact, one of the respondents from ES2007S did mention this as a possible reason for not wanting to use Facebook. Another challenge for the teacher may be keeping students on task and directing their posts and comments toward course content, or in a related manner, ensuring that their contributions and interactions are not inflammatory, either in tone or in subject matter. One of this paper’s authors had a student who made several inappropriate posts, including his/her posting links to opinionated articles related to religious beliefs and sexual orientation (only tangentially related to course content), followed by contentious interpretations and assertions. That same student had a propensity for using a condescending tone when responding to opinions that disagreed with his own.
Recognizing and addressing issues such as those described above requires the teacher to closely monitor the Facebook page and then to swiftly react in much the same way that one does when other activities produce unexpected and unwanted results: with appropriate tact and intervention strategies.
The use of class Facebook pages in ES2002 and ES2007S proved to be a worthwhile activity for a number of reasons. From an educator’s perspective, the Facebook pages are easy to set up, administer and maintain. From a student’s perspective, they are convenient to access and a non-threatening means of becoming more familiar with classmates. From a pedagogical perspective, the pages are an effective way for students to be motivated to source for their own course content-related materials, to share that content and their ideas on it in a public forum, and just as importantly, to interact and engage each other in an informal way outside of the classroom. As supervising teachers, we have experienced how this process facilitated greater student engagement and understanding of concepts, and we noted how relevant content “conversations” on Facebook were often carried back and forth between cyberspace and the classroom.
Social media platforms such as Facebook are now readily available as teaching tools, ones that language and communications teachers should seriously consider for augmenting their teaching practice, providing students with a greater sense of the learner’s community and yet another channel for taking charge of their own knowledge development, and finally, for connecting formal and informal learning.
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Arrington, M. (2005, September 7). 85% of college students use Facebook. TechCrunch. Retrieved September 30, 2011, from http://www.techcrunch.com/2005/09/07/85-of-college-students-use-Facebook/
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Blackstone, B., & Harwood, C. (2011). Pedagogical blogging for university