Something to tell my daughter ...

... who is headed off to Girl Scout camp fairly soon. Thanks, Clancy.

I'd barely heard of Facebook until a couple of days ago. As I write this, I'm in Olympia, Washington, attending the Washington Center's National Summer Institute for Learning Communities. One of the presentations dealt with online communities, and discussed the risks involved with using sites like MySpace or Facebook as a tool for developing a sense of community with your students. Several faculty members spoke highly of the practice; others thought the risks were too great.

Tom Wright
Two Cultures

Learning from FB and MS

FWIW, I'm part of a group which is looking into FB and MS and trying to think about what we can learn from them in designing electronic portfolio software. We're scheduled to present our findings in October at The Assessment Conference. If anybody has any burning references or ideas, I'd be really excited to hear about them. If Tom's conference is any indicator, I think we'll be seeing a lot sessions on this topic at various conferences. Our group's perspective is that given the amount of energy in these social networks, there must be something we can transfer from to the more formal inquiry of the classroom. I'm envisioning some sort of rating system, perhaps like digg, where FB/MS participants might tag which (and there might be few) ideas in discussion could be transferred to an academic classroom. Content aggregation again, I suppose.

If anyone is interested in coming, or, better still, sharing ideas and resources, here's a copy of our prospectus:

The use of electronic portfolios to document and assess student learning is growing rapidly across higher education. In electronic portfolios, we are asking students to collect, reflect on, and arrange evidence of learning for an audience. While some applications of electronic portfolios focus solely on generating data for programmatic assessment, the true power of the portfolio composition process is that students are simultaneously generating assessment data and becoming intentional learners who can represent themselves effectively to an audience with whom they want to create a relationship. The goal of many programs is to help students become lifewide and lifelong learners who use the strategies they have learned through portfolios beyond the classroom and after they have graduated. One of the central challenges in promoting such transfer is the difficulty of tapping students’ intrinsic motivations. One source of insight into how to engage those motivations is to examine ways that students represent themselves online outside of formal educational contexts.

In parallel to the steady growth of electronic portfolios in higher education, there is an explosive increase in the use of online social networking sites by students, particularly Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/) and MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/). MySpace now receives more daily hits than Google, and is second only to Yahoo as the Web’s busiest destination. The median age range of MySpace users is 18-24. Facebook is a similar site targeted explicitly to college students. The numbers of students who use this site on a regular basis is similarly staggering. On both sites, students compose profiles describing themselves in order to make or maintain relationships with others. Students form and join groups, reflect on their lives through blog entries, and document them by posting photographs. The parallels to electronic portfolios are clear. In both cases students are creating self-representations, seeking to convince an audience to understand themselves in a particular way.

In this session, drawing on our work as part of the National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research, we will explore what educators implementing and supporting electronic portfolios have to learn from MySpace and Facebook. After presenting an overview of both phenomena, we will describe the empirical research on social networking and community-embedded learning and our own experiences observing and using these sites to engage questions such as:

• What do students value about their use of social networking sites, and how can these values inform the design of electronic portfolio programs and software?
• How might social networking tools be used to locate collaborators and receive feedback during the process of self-assessment?
• How might educators use Facebook and MySpace in the classroom to integrate students’ authentic self-representational practices into portfolio instruction?
• What models of online interaction might be discovered in online social networking that can be used to build rubrics for assessing collaboration and communication?
• What evidence is there in students’ self-representations in both social networking profiles and electronic portfolios that social and academic identities intersect? How might we assess the extent to which folio thinking transfers to self-representation beyond the classroom through analyzing Facebook and MySpace use?

Because of the volume and diversity of student self-representation in these new online spaces, our investigations will but scratch the surface. Throughout the workshop, we will invite participants to share their own observations and to generate and prioritize questions for future research. We will use these questions both to inform our ongoing inquiry and the future work of the National Coalition for Electronic Portfolio Research.