I mentioned that I am going to start to look into using Facebook as a means of organizing a cohort of students so that they have a place that they can get to know each other and start to care about (read b***h and whine) their experiences at the same time they are interacting with their other friends, they might find that they have more in common with their school “friends” in addition to their “real” friends (as mentioned many times, these online “friends” might be best defined as contacts). I’m thinking this might help, as one friend mentioned last night at supper – we’ve moved from letter that take days to write, to email that takes minutes (perhaps hours) to facebook – where we only write in lines that take seconds… much like SMS. Perhaps the reason why other ideas to use discussions and the like have failed is because they take too much time… students might be willing to commit a few seconds to a school related topic, when they are only willing to commit several seconds to their host of friends.
Some of the issues that might be brought up with this plan include the deviance that happened in Mississippi and rebellion from some people who don’t want to feel trapped within a single system (ala this post from Ning). Speaking of Ning, this might be another place to try to establish the cohort interactions out of class, but I think it’s not going to have anywhere near the traction as it likely has nowhere near the name recognition.
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