Some things you might already know about facebook

            The funniest thing happened this week! (I told this story in class while we were discussing the negative aspects of facebook) The morning of my group’s facebook presentation, I got a message from an old friend. We grew up together and have been facebook friends for a long time, but we don’t really make any effort to talk to each other anymore. So I’m getting ready for class that morning when I see I have a facebook message. It’s him, and the message says, “Trevor are you mad?” to which I respond, “Am I mad? Why?” Well, my ‘friend’ goes on to explain how somebody had posted photoshopped pictures of me on an Internet page and that I should ask them to take them down. He sent me some broken link and told me how to enter it into the browser correctly to see my pictures… I started laughing to myself as I instantly realized this obviously wasn’t my friend at all, but a hacker. So I started to go along with it to see how far he would go. I asked if they were the pictures he took of me last week (I haven’t seen him in years) to which he replied he was not sure, but possibly. Then my friend jumped back onto his facebook and changed his password, thus ending my discussion with this hacking stranger. Too bad, I really enjoyed talking with the guy…

            Well this week we had to prepare for our group presentations. Lucky for us, our group got assigned to teach the rest of the class about facebook...  But who doesn’t already know everything about facebook? We all have one (even our teacher) and our entire class communicates via facebook for homework and collaborations. So the task of teaching the class about facebook was actually very interesting because my group and I went searching for things that the class wouldn’t already know. I was particularly blessed because my group assigned me to head the business and education section of our project (Given, I am the only business major in our entire class). Easily enough, I went searching and found a lot of information about businesses using facebook. Facebook even has its own page promoting business on their site (See it here) which I won’t go into explaining too much, because it’s already very well organized on their website.

            Just over a year ago, I had the privilege of serving the Lord shoulder to shoulder with the owner/entrepreneur of Mystic Chains Co. He himself launched the company with a friend in November, and consecutively created a facebook page to promote it. Needless to say, facebook has been a great media amplifier for their business and is a fun way to get potential customers interested in their products. Check out their page if you have some time, and you can see all of the pictures sent in from customers, as well as contests and sales they promote on facebook, too.

            As for the education side of facebook: I don’t have much to say. I believe that to use facebook as an educational resource you would first have to educate the person who plans on using it on how to effectively learn from it. The facebook education page itself seems like just a bunch of links to other educational resources. Given that it does connect people to educational opportunities, I wouldn’t necessarily consider it a primary educational resource. There have been countless apps and games created on facebook to promote online learning, but none of them seem to be as effective as a real classroom setting, or simply better-developed software.  I believe that facebook is primarily a social platform, and will always be primarily social regardless of any attempts to promote its educational use. It is what it is: A social platform. And there are so many well-developed software programs for teaching out there, that it seems like a waste of time to try converting facebook into a platform for them too.