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The Real Reason Schools Need Facebook
By James Levy, Northwestern University

There's one good reason why schools are likely to block access to the Facebook domain on their campus networks: It's a major source of distractions. But after months of research I've come to see that potential for distractions as one of Facebook's most valuable qualities for education.

It may seem obvious enough, but the distraction issue was only brought to my attention after I spent months developing educational tools for Facebook. As File Platform Director for box.net, I developed a document collaboration tool on Facebook designed specifically for educational use. Last summer, when the site announced it was closing its own courses program to support third party educational utilities, I was invited to the company's Palo Alto headquarters to give a talk about learning on Facebook.

I spoke in a conference room lined with eye-popping David Choe paintings, and filled with a throng of platform developers as well as familiar faces like Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. I described how developers could incorporate each member's detailed friend network to enhance the learning process. After I'd finished cycling through my presentation slides, I took questions from the audience.

One of the many young programmers in the audience raised his hand. "Education on Facebook sounds great in theory," he said, "especially because the site is so popular with students." I nodded in agreement. With Facebook's emerging ubiquity among teenagers, it seemed natural for teachers to start considering the possibility of incorporating the "social graph" into their curriculum.

"But," the developer continued with a hint of sarcasm, "don't you think Facebook would be just a tiny bit too distracting for school use?"

The question caught me off guard. With a head full of production code, I hadn't even considered the distraction issue. I had no real answer to offer, so I just said "I'm not sure. It would be best to ask teachers what they think."

I spent the next couple of months doing just that. I interviewed 50 instructors from public and private high schools, professors from universities and community colleges, a special education teacher, and an after-school tutor, among many others. All knew of Facebook though less than half had accounts of their own. While many expressed concerns about privacy and misuse of personal data if Facebook were to be used in an educational setting, almost all expressed deep concern about distractions. More than half of the high-school teachers noted that Facebook was blocked on their school network as a result of its disruptive nature.

But if there's one place where distraction is an even worse problem than in schools, it's the office. So why don't we consider the acquisition of productivity skills to be just as important as basic reading and writing skills for future workers of the twenty-first century? It's essential that students learn how to overcome distraction. They should be encouraged to participate on sites like Facebook to increase their presence on the social graph and learn about collaboration and network interactions—all while developing skills that will help them cope with a world that will always be full of distractions.

About the author
James Levy is now enrolled at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism, where he is studying social media and collaborative learning. He enjoys surfing, sailing, and listening to "hippie jazz."

From: Tim Dalton (email) Wildern School Looking at this from a slightly different direction Date: 09/17/2009 03:13:47 We too have been looking at Facebook/etc and trying to work out how we can best make use of it. The most common objection we hear is always loosely this, about it being a distraction- whether from the educational activity you should be doing online or from what is happening in the class that you should be concentrating on. There are all sorts of debates raging about Internet filtering in UK education so I'm not going there, but it has occurred to us we could think about this in a different way. Rather than thinking about Facebook as being a distraction from time that should be spent learning, we've been looking at how we could get the school somehow present in the time the kids spend on there socially. So yes, having your friend list there while you should be studying might be more distracting than being logged into the school learning platform, but if our activities on Facebook were engaging enough that students would choose to visit in their free time then it has to be a good thing.   From: Paul Desmarais (email) Boise State Univrsity What If Date: 03/30/2008 12:30:59 It is possible that in trying to exploit the popularity of the social networking activity enjoyed by teens (and, apparently over teens)to foster education you may destroy its cachet with the kids. I would also argue that while the ''distraction'' aspect of using Facebook in education is valid, privacy issues are at odds with incorporating Facebook into education. (By that I mean privacy of the students using Facebook and those who do who would rather their information was not exposed to education professionals in a school setting. For example, if you used Facebook in your class, a student would have to have a page, correct? Which would mean you were forcing them (minors) to expose personal data on the internet.) Finally, and most importantly, incorporating Facebook into an educational setting is erasing the lines between work and play. It may be that people don''t think those lines exist any more, but they do. Learning where those lines are and how to walk on the applicable side at the applicable time is part of the education process. Learning to keep work and play separate might be far more valuable in educating high schoolers than exploiting the popularity of their favorite web sites and activities for educational, and, of course profitable,purposes. (There will be advertising on the site, and the visitors internet travels will be recorded and cookies added, and maybe a spy ware program or two? That data will be mined and sold, right? For these and other reasons I think that the Biblical phrase "render unto Caesa those things that are Caesars and   From: DJ Boba Fett (email) Customer Facebook Fraudulent Date: 01/22/2008 06:24:40 Please read my blog at www.myspace.com/djbobafett to see my running trials and tribulations with this site. At this point, they up and cancelled me, with over 200 hours of work on my site, pages, events, profiles and advertisements. They are billing my card even though I no longer have an account. I called the Palo Alto offices at 650-543-4800 to dispute the bill (as it''s ads for a deleted site they''re billing me for) and had to call 3 times before a human picked up. I talked to a female Sam (supposedly the only Sam that works there, yeah right) and she said they do NOT offer voice billing support. i told her that by refusing to work with me, she is okaying my choice to dispute the charges with my credit card company. We''ll see. If you have ANY problems with the site or infrastructure, please call them, ask to talk to SAM, and tell them "DJ Boba Fett sent you."   From: Caryl Oliver (email) Freelance Advisor on technology in Education And after facebook Date: 01/03/2008 01:46:59 I loved hearing what James had to say and agree totally with using the tools that students use anyway to support delivery of learning. My concern, though, is with our preparedness as educators to be able to move with the speed required to make sure we are actually on the same wave as the students... Once mainstream media, and therefore most teachers, start to discuss Facebook or whatever, how much longer is it likely to stay cool? I work every day with teachers at all levels trying to get them to think about their teaching in a digital world in general rather than about one platform or another. If they can prepare material that is inter-active, in small files (easy download on any device) and engaging individually or for groups then they certainly can make whatever social computing phenomenon work for them and their students. But if they have to re-work it for every new platform they will never embrace any of them. What do you think?   From: John Thompson (email) Buffalo State College Life Portal? Date: 12/21/2007 06:55:30 If Facebook, et al. really want to impact society (i.e., increase users and user activity), then it will need to race Google, etc. to provide the 21st century equivalent of the shopping mall - i.e., find everything (including education) at the site. Sorta like a "life portal." Tracking/participating in a ton of individual, disconnected sites is OK in the beginning, but if the Facebook sites get it right, then their content (and easy appearance/navigation) will drive traffic to their sites.   From: Michael Staton (email) Courses on Facebook well said Date: 12/16/2007 03:45:36 As a developer of educational tools on facebook, I completely agree with James. Students must learn to interact with others using social web 2.0 means, as well as to cope with ubiquitous distraction while being productive.   From: gina stefanini (email) Public Schools What if the learners were involved? Date: 12/15/2007 07:53:04 I wonder what would happen if you engaged the learners in this conversation. What if they could be part of the equation; looking at the potential (distraction) problem and helping to solve the solution. When learners (especially teens) become actively involved in the why-how-why of their learning then they are engaged and invested in learning. What if our students became so engaged in the learning and learning process (just like they are when they are on facebook for hours every night) that nothing could distract them from it? I don''t think you should lose the intensity of engagement that facebook provides but use it to engage them with learning. Just a few thoughts from an educator and a parent of teens, gina PS. You may be interested in Universal Design for Learning at Cast, org and Making Learning Visible at the Harvard University/Project Zero website. These are organizations that look at the affective side of learning, exactly what you are hitting with Facebook.   From: Mary Gutwein (email) Humana LInkedIn Date: 12/14/2007 11:32:12 There is a professional website called LinkedIn where professionals like myself keep up with only professional contacts. Why couldn''t there be a specific, facebook-like site for students? The site could be limited, somehow, to educational endeavors. Just a thought.   From: Mark Notess (email) Indiana University Activity clumping Date: 12/14/2007 11:05:17 I''ve also been thinking a lot about learning in Facebook. Certainly Facebook could be distracting. But so is sitting in a classroom full of other people. That said, my concern about Facebook as an academic platform is whether the activities for which people come to Facebook are perhaps in a different activity clump than the activities associated with academic learning--and students may well prefer keeping those clumps separate, or at least they may want to carefully manage the connection between the two. For instance, they may want to pull some of their profile information from Facebook into their CMS, but they may not want to advertise what they spent last night doing instead of writing their paper. What I am suggesting is that to call something a "distraction" may merely mean we''re trying to mix activity clumps in undesirable ways.