Leave Me and My Facebook Alone

This week we have conducted a number of classroom observations. An interesting commonality between observations was what one should do about students who are using social media while in class. Accordingly, this week’s SoTL article, “Leave Me and My Facebook Alone!” Understanding College Students’ Relationship with Facebook and its Use for Academic Purposes speaks to these rich conversations. This paper by Gettman and Cortijo considers how Facebook is used in its native context and uses both qualitative and quantitative methodologies to view how students and instructors react to using Facebook as an educational tool. Importantly the authors discuss new metrics to measure the “appropriateness” and “social purposes” to understand the nature of Facebook when integrating it into student work.

The findings initially point to the fact that students see Facebook as a tool to engage in social media connections. A trend from the study indicated that students are interested in receiving course information via Facebook as it is a medium that is accessed on a regular basis by many. Conversely, the study found that many students wanted to keep their private and scholarly activities separate. Finally, an interesting finding is that the more the instructor is involved in the organization of activities that use Facebook, the less comfortable students are in accessing the information.