A friend recently contacted me about an idea she had to use Facebook to teach history, by having students pick political thinkers from the enlightenment to today and have them friend each other and talk. This great idea of hers got me thinking about how the temporal- and connection-focus of Facebook could be leveraged to build powerful and engaging activities. While Facebook isn’t the right tool for these activities (due to not being controlled environment, and not having the appropriate teacher oversights), a Facebook app could be. Here is my response to her inquiry

“I think it makes total sense and your instincts for how to tap into students ways of thinking to make this activity work are right on. I also think participating in and visualizing connections is a really great way to teach otherwise abstract ideas that you refer to. Unfortunately I don’t know of tools that can do this really well, especially the concepts part. Some things that might be problems:

• defining the connections – you need a way for each student to not only reach out and connect two thinkers, but to define why they’re connect (e.g. the ideals they share). Currently Facebook doesn’t allow any sort of connection metadata like this.
• creating the profiles – Facebook Pages are okay, but not perfect. Has quite a bit of unnecessary overhead just to create things. It’s okay if you’re only making one, but if you’re making a number of thinkers, it’s extra work. Also, duplication is an issue (two people make Obama).
• connecting thinkers to concepts – there’s no straightforward way to have many ideas or ideals connected to users- its just one user to another.

That said, Facebook Pages can work, and to really exploit the value of Facebook Pages, you want students to make good use of the Wall for ongoing publishing activities. I’m assuming you’re assigning students one enlightenment thinker each, where they will build a Facebook Page for them. From there you’ve got a bunch of activities you can run.

Activity 1 – Define Connections

Students should connect thinkers to each other based on common ideals and perspectives. Every time the student connects their thinker to another, the student should post on the other’s wall about what they agree upon (defines why they are connected).

Activity 2 – Introduce an Event

Create an ‘event’ (a news article), and have students respond to that event by commenting as their thinker on other thinker’s walls. How would the thinker respond to the event? How would their conversations go with their buddies? Would their ideals be reinforced or challenged?

Activity 3 – Post Updates

Have students post the growth of their thinkers’ views over time, using their own walls to post updates. Ask students to start each post with the date and time that the thinker is going through their thoughts. This would be especially great if you selected a period of time and had everyone in sync (e.g. you email students telling them what period of time it is every few hours, and have them post a set of wall posts representing the context and social scenarios of the time).

Activity 4 – Find Differences

I believe the most effective way to teach is to have students point out differences (not similarities). Give students a concept and have them seek out a thinker that has a radically opposing viewpoint and a slightly opposing viewpoint. Have the student post on their wall describing how they are different.

For activities 2 and 4, you should use the ability to attach Links to reference the concept or event you want to have them post on. Post articles somewhere (e.g. Google Docs) and give students the URLs of those articles. Then have the students post on the walls attaching links to those articles, and add their comments along with the posting.

In general, letting students loose to role play a character naturally taps into how we’re wired as social creatures, and as a learning exercise really has no upper boundary for how creative and involved a student can get. If two students characters get in a ‘fight’ by disagreeing back and forth on their walls, citing their own histories, that’s a fantastic outcome.”

There are probably many dozen activities that can be put together with the tools Facebook has and lightly structured teacher involvement. Assessment would be an interesting challenge, but probably not that difficult.

I think with just a few weeks of engineering time, it’s possible to build an application that supports the above PLUS privacy and tracking. Maybe when I get some downtime :)