Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

11/02/07

Couldn't Resist The Facebook Phenomenon

Filed under: New Technology — timwang @ 11:56:49 am

Yep, I am on Facebook now... I have tried to resist it all that time but I registered today. The reason made me to do this is there have been increasing number of faculty members here at UBC are mentioning Facebook to me and ask me why not tag along. They were mainly driven to the platform by their students or their own kids. But the amazing thing is most of them are enjoying the experience. I was just curious to see if there are opportunities to build educational applications out of the Facebook API.

Anyway, I am quite amazed how many people can Facebook dig up based on my hotmail address book. From high school to University friends that have gone missing for ages. Every few hours I log in, there are some new friends waiting for me! It is a really impressive experience. But I am still quite skeptical in regard to the privacy issues behind the accounts. With my co-worker Sung's help, I was able to tighten up the privacy settings. Of course Sung has been telling me that I am paranoid. Oh well, I will see where does this rabbit hole take me...

UPDATE: It's 2:00AM and I am still POKING around on Facebook... Not a good sign...

Comments:

Comment from: Eric Bort [Visitor] Email · http://livingchildren.com/blog/
My wife forced me to join.. I'm kind of the same way... anti social networking because it just seems like such a mess with all the posts, random people, upkeep involved. I'm still not sure I like it at all. Facebook especially is a little over the top with features, but seeing (I think) Microsoft just spent 250 million buying 1.6% ownership in the company there must be something good about it!
PermalinkPermalink 11/07/07 @ 10:38
Comment from: timwang [Member] Email · http://blog.loaz.com/timwang
Hi Eric, I am sorry to say my feeling towards the 1.6% share acquisition is a pure business move. However, behind it, you can certainly feel the potential of the market penetration Facebook can evoke. It attracts our audiences in this case are the learners. I happened to be walking into our library yesterday afternoon (in and out for less than 15 min) and eye-witnessed 4 computers (some were their own laptops) were used to browse Facebook in the library! One of them is showing it to other friends! This is why many educators are trying out Facebook, simply attempting to reach their learners more. This fascinates me as an educational technologist. But the social networking part, I really think Facebook is just a "smarter version of LAVALIFE"... :) -Tim
PermalinkPermalink 11/07/07 @ 15:21
Comment from: Eric Bort [Visitor] Email · http://livingchildren.com/blog/
It's also a much friendlier... well... network friendly version of MySpace without all the annoying bits, so I'll give it that.

Maybe it's just that it's so new I have yet to figure out how to work an online network the way I can with a local (physical human) network in my own town. I may be computer literate but that doesn't mean the benefits of online social networking are always apparent.

It tends to be the random contacts that bring in the big jobs though!
PermalinkPermalink 11/08/07 @ 09:35

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