Giving Facebook a try

The other day I had an email from our network manager with a link to a BBC news item promoting the use of social networking in colleges using Facebook; strange that I often go to some lengths in separating social from computer networking during conversations, still. The article suggests that using Facebook, improves both engagement and retention, mmm. I have for some reason, that right now I am not completely sure why, avoided using Facebook with my classes. I think I had probably formed the view, that we are likely to be about as welcome as educators in using the network for college matters, as turning up at a rave and handing out course notes, but I am happy to be proved wrong on that one. Anyway it was a Saturday night and I thought give it a try; yes that is when I received the email. My experience with contacting students using their college emails has I must say not proven very successful as I am likely to get no more than one read confirmation within 24 hours. So I started by not using college email, but first went to the vle, Moodle, to see what their preferred emails are, surprise surprise, just about all of them were of the form Jbloggs@anyserver.com! So I used the vle contacts and sent out my Facebook invitations, within a couple of hours 8 out of twenty had replied, so perhaps this may not be such a bad idea after all. I have opened up the question on how they would like the network to be used, but for my own part right now I am not going to abuse with nagging messages about course work, what is clearly a window into some interesting, unexpected and intriguing views on student life.