Originated in the American college world, Facebook had its beginnings in student communication on campus. This background perhaps explains why Facebook is used for recreation more than the other social media tools.
The benefit of Facebook is its prevalence. It is overwhelmingly the most popular networking service. Facebook has an estimated 100 million monthly users, MySpace has about 55 million while the networking service for professionals, LinkedIn, has 11 million. Naturally teaching ought to be taken where the people are likely to congregate anyway. It is also a common phenomenon that the course participants’ conversation is self-ignited on Facebook, and not on the discussion board set up in the course environment.
Share, Interact, Inform
A private or open group or page can be opened for the course. Both are primarily used for interaction, but the conversation can be triggered by publishing links, images and videos. A good idea is to encourage participation by keeping the treatment of the topics fairly light. The nature of the service should be taken into account in the tone of the messages.
A Facebook group can be started for interaction between people who share common interests. The group page is good for transmitting information about what is happening in the field and it offers the participants the opportunity to discuss the newest publications. eLearning professionals shows an example of a Facebook page in this kind of use. The student groups work on the same principle.
Like groups, an open Facebook page can also work as a community for informal learning. It is a good place to gather the different offshoots from face-to-face teaching and various types of additional material. This is how I use my Kielipoliisi page.
Marketing for seminars and conferences and engaging the participants works well on Facebook, for example Online Educa Berlin. But you have to remember to keep it interactive: one-way communication does not suit social media.
A Walled Garden
Facebook is essentially a kind of an online discussion board with some extra features. The usage and the content define how beneficial it is, therefore the perspective of negative news coverage is often too narrow. The problem of Facebook from the users’ viewpoint has been the closed-off nature of the service and the privacy settings that are notoriously difficult to manage. These issues have to be considered when planning the usage, but the entire service doesn’t have to be rejected because of it. Nevertheless, Facebook continues to have many opponents, and its usage in education has been criticized.
Facebook is very useful in teaching languages. You can choose to use the English version of the page, but it is possible to select the language you are teaching. It’s easy to offer hints about interesting groups and pages in various languages, and networking evolves naturally. The ease of participation has often been regarded as one of the reasons why Facebook is so successful: a thumb-up is a much more effortless way to voice your opinion than supportive statements.