Reflections on Facebook

Recently, the question was posed in the "What are you learning on Facebook" group: what is your big "aha?" I'm not sure I've had one big 'aha', but rather a series of small ones -- about immediacy of connections, visualizing one's friend network, and the power of weak ties over strong ones.

Here is an updated version of the answer I posted on the "What are you learning on Facebook" group [link only available to Facebook subscribers]:. The complete question which Marcia Connor asked was, "Has Facebook provided you a big "aha!" moment because you found, figured out, discovered or had introduced to you something that helped you make connections you hadn't before?"

To date, it feels as if I've had a series of smaller 'aha's' rather than one big one:

1) FB creates immediacy of connections while online -- connections are easier to reach. So I keep in better touch with family members and notice that they keep in better touch as well. It may not sound like much, but I get somewhat more info about them than I would otherwise get.

2) A corollary is that FB is like a giant living compliation of one's friend network which one can monitor and be connected to others at times and ways of one's choosing. Like Basecamp, its utility is deceptively simple -- it doesn't look like it should amount to much, but there's something about building one's life network of friends and then having it visually instantiated, rapidly accessible. It is an incomplete network -- more of my friends are missing from Facebook than are there -- but what's there has a certain wholeness that didn't exist previously. And then there's the access to a new network of loosely tied 'friends' (see below).

2a) As a result, FB has already enabled me to help others make connections or have interactions which otherwise would never have happened.

3) FB is a useful tool for getting in touch with long lost acquaintances. In the process, it's also a good self-reflection tool -- for instance, by examining the reasons why I choose or don't choose to contact someone.

4) The power of loose ties -- this was suggested to me by someone who contacted me on FB out of the blue. I had thought of FB as a network of my tight-knit friends; she re-framed it for me as a way to learn from a network of loose connections. So far, it's been very effective in that way. This may be the biggest of the 'ahas' for me.

5) I was fascinated by how Stephen Downes found a quick answer to a question he had by posting on FB -- that's cool but probably requires a friend network the size of his. That's one of the functions I'm looking to have: treating my FB (or LinkedIn?) network as a giant sounding board for ideas, answers to questions, and other inquiries that would be useful to me and interesting to my network members.

6) This is not necessarily FB-specific, but a colleague impressed upon me the importance of figuring out what you want a tool to do for you (functional requirements list) rather than going tool-happy to start. Another colleague impressed upon me the importance of trying out tools to start with just to discover what they can do. So I've been spending some time in the cognitively dissonant space created by these clashing approaches.

7) Because I've found unexpected worthwhile affordances about FB, I was more willing to give Twitter a 2nd try and am finding worthwhile affordances there too. Which in turn will make me more open to trying a new tool.

What does this have to do with online education? Tools such as FB create new possibilities for obtaining information, interacting with learning participants, and creating new knowledge. The focus should be on the specifics of these capabilities; the tools should remain means and not an end in themselves (I dread the prospect of online courses requiring the use of FB, Second Life, Twitter, et al.). But I welcome the prospect of online courses requiring students to obtain information, interact with learning participants, and create new knowledge in new ways, and then let them choose which tools help them do this with appropriate scaffolding and support.