We had a bit of an incident last week with a course that’s using Blogs@Baruch. In this course, every student was to keep a blog, which was then republished in an aggregator blog so that every participant in the class could easily access and comment upon everything published by the other participants.
Last week the class abandoned its use of Blogs@Baruch to instead use a group on Facebook called “Baruch Blogs Down!”
photo credit: Squid P. Quo
The name of the group is a reference to server problems we had at the beginning of the term, which were resolved almost two months ago; we’ve been up without interruption for almost 60 days. In fact, members of the class were posting to their blogs without problem for a good six weeks before they switched to Facebook.
The faculty member apologized when it was pointed out to him that the name of the Facebook group was insulting and mocked the work that had gone into building our system and supporting his course, last semester and this. He noted that the switch wasn’t planned, that his students suggested the move and the group name, and that they were more comfortable using Facebook to exchange thoughts about course material. So he went with it.
I have problems with this on a few levels, even beyond the insulting group name. First, the only argument to go to Facebook — which I accept is completely the faculty member’s prerogative — seems to be that the students “felt more comfortable” with the application than they did Blogs@Baruch. Comfort with a medium has pedagogical value, for sure; but you’d like to think that more than students’ comfort would determine the choosing of a technological solution. I’m not sure that it did.
Second, there’s the implications of using Facebook in an instructional setting given the recent conflicts over their Terms of Service and assertions of ownership over user content. I don’t think the class discussed what was to be gained and lost from switching platforms; the students just lobbied the professor to use something “easier,” not better. These points are both problematic in no small part because this is an Internet Marketing class!
Finally, there’s the inaccurate implication embedded in the group’s name, which appeared in a public forum. I’ve thought a bit about this, since I, too, have been guilty of snarking a piece of software. Blogs@Baruch was down periodically early in the semester, and that had a negative impact on some courses’ use of the system. We DO deserve to get called out for failing to deliver what we promised to deliver.
Yet, there’s a difference between mocking us and mocking a behemoth corporation with a closed source product. The difference embodies one of the core issues in instructional technology, which is often seen as a subset of information technology rather than as its own unique area of university life that requires the establishment of relationships and understanding across the disciplines.
If Blackboard goes down, users of the system are helpless, and can only wait for word that the system is back up. They can call someone, but that person can only tell them that a ticket has been submitted. Users of Blogs@Baruch have a name, and a number, and someone who can explain to them what the problem is and how it is being addressed. If something on the system isn’t working the way they want it to work, they can speak with someone about hacking it, adapting it, fixing it, strengthening it. Blackboard is a closed box without a face, whereas Blogs@Baruch is an open sandbox that gives back in proportion to what you put in. Blackboard is primarily an administrative system that allows the delivery of information. Blogs@Baruch is primarily a tool for the creative use of technology in instruction.
The faculty member (who has graciously apologized and changed the Facebook’s group’s name) should have realized this; he had benefited from our close support in the past and had been told to contact us if and as problems arose. He never did. Instead, he treated Blogs@Baruch as information technology, as a data delivery service, and wasn’t really interested in bringing the system and its flexibility to his pedagogy. He and his students saw no difference between Blogs@Baruch and Blackboard or the escalators in the Vertical Campus.
So, I’ve learned a couple things from this episode. First: snark is fine, but if you’re gonna snark, do it in an informed way or in a hidden place, or you going to be called out. Second: we need to do a better job of explaining to members of our community what Blogs@Baruch is and what it isn’t. If you can’t see any difference between what this system potentially provides and what Blackboard or Facebook provide, then those systems will probably work just fine for you.
The idea of working with student assignments via facebook seem very odd to me. I can’t imagine wanting to open up my network that way. Also, it presumes that everyone has a facebook account, which isn’t actually the case.
PS: glad you didn’t let them get away with sullying our good name…
Nicely said. Facebook is not a very sophisticated answer to short-term technical problems at Blogs@Baruch. Please, I say this to my students as well, please cut the Facebook umbilical cord!
Oh that comment was made by Zohra not Hillary. But I don’t know how to fix it thanks to my technical backwardness!
(snark)Someone needs to give Hillary a logging out tutorial.(/snark)
Hey!– I always try to log out! Maybe I don’t always succeed.
But this is the real Hillary, standing up. And I second Zohra/Hillary: Nicely said, Luke. And I do agree that part of what this incident reveals seems to be indicative of a lack of patience towards any/all technological “tools” thanks to past (negative) experiences. As you said, if you approach Blogs@Baruch the same was as you do the broken VC escalators, it won’t be a working relationship but full-on combat. As another example, the WordPress forums are famously friendly and helpful; if you’re a new WordPress user who assumes that seeking help will be as infuriating as a call to your cell phone company, you’re missing out.
Logging off/out.
Part of the issue here, I think, is that the students resisted having to write on the blog. The FB group seems to relieve them of needing to reflect substantively on their work in the course. It’s much more a means of communication than reflection.
The pedagogical issue here might be framed in terms of inertia: some students might not want to use WP because they’re not used to it, and, likewise, some students might not want to engage in reflection because they’re not used to it. Both kinds of inertia are undesirable: inertia against learning unfamiliar technologies is bad because our students will only succeed in their eventual careers if they are open to learning new platforms, and inertia against reflection is bad for more intellectual reasons. Faculty members have to choose their battles, though. There may be instances in which it makes sense to cave on WP vs Facebook in order to better serve the other goals of the class and fight other kinds of student inertia. I’m not saying this is the correct course of action in this instance – prima facie, in a class devoted to Internet Marketing, I would say that it’s not. But the possibility should be recognized that, in some cases, it might not be implementing what is, from the technologist’s point of view, the “ideal” technological solution.
That said, I think it’s interesting that Mikhail points out that moving to Facebook, in the case in question, meant not only giving up the fight for the better tech, but also the fight for reflection. If this observation is true, then indeed both battles were lost. Yet I want to cast doubt on the suggestion that moving to FB *necessitates* a movement away from reflection. While there might be structural reasons why FB is not well suited to academic reflection (off the top of my head, I might point to the fact that rhetoric of the Profile and the Status Update are inherently more focused on the non-intellectual aspects of the individual than the idea-space of a blog), my hunch is that the vapidity of FB content is, like so many other classroom problems, an inertial issue. In other words, FB content tends to be non-reflective because it’s always been that way, not because it *has* to be that way. (I beat this horse to death in – plug! – a blog post from a while back: http://teleogistic.net/2008/12/does-facebook-promote-bad-rhetorical-skills/).
In the end, for some of the reasons that Luke mentions in the OP – especially the intellectual property issues – I feel uneasy about Facebook as an academic space. (And, for those same reasons, very good about WPMu and Blogs@Baruch!) But I remain open to the possibility that FB could have some role in some classrooms, if properly conceived by the students and faculty.
Thanks for the awesome comment, Boone. I didn’t write this on the original post, out of some fear that the faculty member discussed might find it and be offended, but, I guess I’ll write it here in response to the what you and Mikhail have offered…. I think it was as much a case (if not more) of the faculty member not wanting to read as it was students not wanting to write.
I agree with Boone’s point that there’s nothing at all that would preclude good teaching and learning from happening on FB. Good teaching and learning can happen independent of medium. But they require thought and reflection and planning; some media are more conducive to encouraging that approach than others. Doesn’t mean that other media can’t be made to work, and the faculty member may find that FB does all he needs. My reaction in this incident evolved at least as much from my feeling that too little consideration was given to the implications of choosing a particular medium in this process as from the sense that we got dissed.
Yes, various media can facilitate learning, but I still cast my vote in favor of old-fashioned selectivity here: Facebook to me is not the “proper” space for pedagogical activity. Having my students submit course-work via Facebook would further encourage their idea of anything goes. How many times do I have to tell them not to use Wikipedia as a major source of information for a research paper simply because it is unreliable? No, Wikipedia is not enough for you to find out about Faulkner’s Southern gothic, for example, because what you get is a diluted, easy-to-digest version of the real “stuff” and you cannot go on eating baby-food all your life. Facebook serves its purpose, but its purpose is not to promote deep thinking, precisely the skill I need my students to practice more.
I don’t understand how the name Baruch Blogs Down was much of a critique of Blogs@Baruch. Perhaps you could explain to me, Luke, in what way you found this nomenclature “insulting.” It seems to me a fairly practical title under the circumstances.
Good question, Michael, and perhaps I should have been clearer about this in my post.
Uptime (a server rating that represents the percentage of time that your site is online) is one of the most important factors in determining the viability of a web platform, particularly a new (and vulnerable) one like Blogs@Baruch. Our uptime rating took a hit early in the semester when too much demand was put on our server… that problem was resolved when BCTC performed a memory upgrade in early February.
Over a month later, the class decided to use Facebook for their communications, which was the prerogative of the faculty member. By then Blogs@Baruch had been up for about 50 days without interruption, and, in fact, the students had been using it quite effectively. Some of them convinced their faculty member that they would prefer Facebook, however, which was more integrated into their daily lives.
Since the decision wasn’t motivated by the server troubles, which had been resolved, the name implied a rationale behind the switch which wasn’t valid. This was a public group on Facebook… any searches of Baruch or Baruch Blogs would yield this group page as a return. I’m certainly no entrepreneur or brand manager; but I do know enough that I don’t want negative or, more precisely, inaccurate representations out there about a project I’ve built. I welcome criticisms that will help us improve our service; snark doesn’t do that.
And, finally… all of this was done after I spent time supporting the class, setting up feeds for the student blogs to filter into one space, and answering student questions through February. I didn’t take the switch personally (because I still think that what I built was more pedagogically sound), but felt that the manner in which it happened and how it was named needed to be addressed.