I met my two Fall classes for the first time today. A total of 270 students and an impossible situation for making a personal connection with many of them. In commenting on this topic, I noted that my syllabi offer a link to this blog and suggested that I use this blog to comment on professional and personal topics. I indicated that most of them were probably more familiar with MySpace and FaceBook and I suggested that I would leave those sites for them.
I do have a FaceBook account and within a couple of minute there was an invitation.
I do think the social networking sites are interesting, but I have mixed feelings about the “friending” thing within university academic settings. I remember listening to a presentation in which the presenter basically said – let’s let them have their space. The power of the sites for multi-way and multi-level interaction is what makes the sites so powerful, but also what makes them a little weird in my situation. My daughter is my friend, but the site suggests I might want to “friend” these other 20-somethings who are friends of my daughter. Hmm. Whether or not I had ever actually met any of them with a few reciprocated clicks of the mouse I might introduce them to 200 Intro Psych students at UND. Not saying this would be a bad thing, but I think I will concentrate on writing blog posts.
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