Facebook is a social networking site that allows users to join, locate friends or networks and interact with each other. The brainchild of Harvard students, use was initially limited to its own tertiary alumni. Nowadays, membership of Facebook is open to all people aged 13 and over, and boasts a membership of more than 350 million users. It is now also possible for members to chat to their conntacts, send messages, share links, update your profile, and add a number of applications to your own profile page (such as Goodreads, Twitter, Lastfm and various others).
Learning resource:
YouTube user julieSoh created a short documentary where tertiary students talk about the pros and the cons of Facebook - it makes for a very funny (and somewhat disturbing) viewing.
Facebook is 'changing the way people meet other people.'
Discovery exercise:
- Visit Facebook and create an account
- Find 1 colleague and add them as a friend
- Find our Manukau Libraries Facebook page and become a fan
- Post a comment to the discussion topic 'What are you reading - RIGHT this minute?'
- Post a comment to the discussion topic 'What is the BEST book you ever read and WHY?
- Find 1 library (public, tertiary or other) and look at what sorts of update they make?
- Create a post about this experience and consider some of these questions: What can Facebook do for you individually? What can Facebook do for us as a public library? Is it easy to use? Is it hard? Would you continue to use Facebook? Have our customers asked about Facebook? What would our customers get out of a Facebook page? Would you promote our page to customers? Why/why not?
6 tasks completed! All you have to do now is complete the online survey and post a summary of your thoughts of the overall web 2.0 experience.
Where to now?
Write your last blog post and summarise your learning and discovery experience: the good, the bad and the oh-so-butt-ugly.
Complete the online survey (this link will be available in the 6th week of the tutorial)
