Creepy Treehouses

Routledge has just published a book entitled Online Social Networking on Campus: Understanding What Matters in Student Culture, by Ana M. Martínez Alemán, chair of educational administration and higher education at Boston College, and Katherine Lynk Wartman, who is resident director at Simmons College and working on a doctorate at Boston College. The two of them studied student attitudes toward and use of Facebook, and reached some interesting conclusions about faculty and administrators (especially student affairs people) friending students for academic or student-life purposes. In yesterday's edition of Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jaschik interviewed Alemán about their findings, including their recommendation that faculty members not friend students:

What does it mean for a faculty member to “friend” a student or accept a friend request from a student? Do the norms and rules of real-world student-faculty relationships fit the world of Facebook campus culture? Students may feel undue pressure and intimidation given the power that the faculty has over students. Unlike the majority of their relationships with friends, the pre-existing, real life faculty-student relationship is not a peer relationship. Students may feel intimidated or obligated to engage in an online social network relationship with a faculty member simply because they recognize the authority and power resident in the faculty. Students may feel powerless to refuse the online invitation, and despite privacy controls, college users can feel that their community boundary has been breeched. My advice: don’t friend students and don’t accept their invitation to be in their network. A code of Facebook ethics for faculty currently exists on the site and I would recommend that faculty review it.

I'm not sure where that "code of Facebook ethics for faculty" is; I ran searches for "faculty" and "ethics" on the Facebook help page and got no hits. If anyone can direct me to it, I'd love to see it!

Alemán also makes an interesting prediction:

SNS [social-networking sites] will become an instructional tool soon. Facebook has already partnered with a course management system; some faculty have begun to use Facebook groups to foster peer learning, conduct group projects, etc. Computer mediated communication technologies have already made it necessary for academic faculty to modify or simply transfer traditional modes and norms of real-life academic and pedagogical communication online. It’s just a matter of time before we see a SNS as a “classroom” experience.

The commenters on the IHE page have tended to disagree somewhat with both the recommendation and the prediction. "Associate Prof at State U" writes:

Definitely don’t “friend” a student, but I do think it is different if a student asks to friend you. In an informal poll, most of my students have said that they feel rejected if a faculty doesn’t accept their friend request, and I have students communicate with me through Facebook who have never come by office hours or emailed (it is somehow less risky to initiate contact with a prof on Facebook). I also have students to whom I am professionally close but who have not “friended” me, and I respect that choice to maintain personal privacy as well. Once students graduate, it is a great way to keep in touch as they move around and change email addresses.

Just remember that if faculty have student friends, they have to keep their pages far more professional and neutral than a normal Facebook page; student friends can see all of our materials, too!

And "W" adds:

I don’t see a problem with accepting a students’ friend request. And you can do so as a professor, and still make your profile as personal as you want it for your friends. How? Facebook has amazing privacy settings. You can make a friend list (all students, for instance) and then restrict how much of your profile they can see, and how much of your activity they can see. Students can see my basic work, school and contact info, but cannot see my status updates, photos tagged of me, or what my friends write on my wall.

That way my friends and I can have our friendly, and sometimes silly banter back and forth, and comment on each others pictures, and my students can still use Facebook to contact me if they want. And joining Facebook means you can set up (and control!) your own groups for courses etc.

The director of "discovery advising" at Virginia Commonwealth University agrees, calling it unnecessarily "'old headed' to think sustaining fairly antiquated rules of professor/student relationships should prevent faculty from engaging their student population in these spaces." This commenter adds: "An overwhelming majority of my advisees are positively giddy that I’m accessible to them in these spaces—our trust-based relationship is strengthened making them more apt to accept my counsel and advice," and "the typical student appreciates a little irreverence from the experts who are their educators. They desire no less expertise from us mind you, just an appreciation of that fact that we’re also human beings." Also: "After having spent the better portion of four years utilizing this valuable tool, I’d like to suggest that we’ll not be able to truly encourage buy-in from the student population unless we 'friend' them in these spaces first."

Michael Staton, CEO of Inigral Inc, notes that "There are ways to interact with students via Facebook without being friends," especially building your own applications. His company has done so, and their app allows instructors to "send gifts, post on walls, share links, see status updates, and play a name game — all without being friends."

Staton also challenges Alemán's claim that Facebook is going to become a course-management system soon:

I contest Aleman’s statement that Facebook will be an instructional tool, and the statement that Facebook has partnered with a Course Management System is false.

Facebook does not partner with application developers. ClassTop, Cramster, and my company Inigral were all early movers to provide LMS features as a Facebook application. Blackboard’s vaporware was late to the game, ClassTop’s app CourseFeed is better and interfaces with Blackboard through their API.

As someone who has built an LMS on Facebook, I can tell you the more you move towards “instructional tool” the more resistance and less use you will end up with.
However, students and instructors are VERY interested in using Facebook as a kind of “ice breaker,” as a tool that can accelerate a sense of community and belonging amongst classmates and the wider campus in general. That’s why we moved our efforts from our Courses app to our Lifecylce Engagement Platform “Schools on Facebook.”

Facebook, as far as I’m concerned, will always be a tool to predict, accelerate, and maintain real world relationships. If you don’t fit within that paradigm, you won’t get much traction.

I like this a lot. Facebook is a great place for maintaining real-world relationships, and while teaching is a real-world relationship also, it's an inherently hierarchical one, and students resist letting those hierarchies leach over into their facebooking. Two of my first-year writing students have friended me after the semester was over and grades had been delivered and viewed, and I confirmed both of them, though I have to admit I wondered what they wanted from me, why they were even interested in friending me--and neither one has ever sent me a msg or gift or written on my wall. Maybe five or six of my former students have friended me after graduation, which I think is quite nice--it's good to be able to keep up with them in their new jobs and cities and even relationships. And I'm quite happy to be Facebook friends with many of the grad students and adjunct instructors who teach in our FYW program. Even though I'm their boss, which might make a Facebook friendship with them a creepy treehouse, they're also my colleagues.

What I don't know about, and would like to hear from commenters about, is the use of Facebook groups for teaching purposes. I know at least one instructor in our program has used it that way, apparently with good results. My guess is that, following Michael Staton's provisos, (a) it's a good way to minimize the hierarchical gap between teachers and students, but also (b) it only works if that gap has already been minimized in class, and the Facebook interface is set up in ways that don't inadvertently accentuate the hierarchy.