Is Facebook As Good As Face-to-Face?
As students begin spending more and more of their socializing time on social networking sites, it seems like they would have to spend less time actually talking face to face. In fact, it seems like they don’t even talk on the phone anymore now that they’ve discovered they can text surreptitiously during class. Add to that the fact that students are most likely going to be spending more and more of their class time in online courses, and it’s not so far-fetched to imagine a near future for our kids that has very little one-on-one interaction.
Does anyone see a problem with this? Is there something our students can get through face-to-face interaction that they can’t get through MySpace?
We posed the question to our members last month via L&L’s discussion forum on the ISTE Community Ning.
Ellen Hildenbrand felt that some educators may be a little starstruck by social networking right now, but not all students learn best that way. She writes:
• Individual needs and characteristics can only be identified through communication—effective communication—and communication itself is not best achieved in a climate which allows for only one medium. Face-to-face is, and will be, an important component of education, at least for as long as it is a human endeavor with humanistic objectives.
Mark Carbone expresses enthusiasm about the new possibilities that social networking is making possible:
• I do see an exciting future where people will have more and more opportunities to live in a blended world that maximizes one’s experiences that embrace face-to-face interactions and relationships, effectively use Facebook, other social networking tools, and other Web 2.0 tools, as a way to connect with people, learn and work in a rich and collaborative manner. As we continue to develop and refine our notions of the meaning of digital citizenship and learn how to embed these fundamental values in each of us, I believe we will have impacted human communication in a truly positive and global way.
An ardent supporter of using social networking in schools, Larry Anderson, who founded the National Center for Technology Planning and writes the NCTP blog, points out that social networking might also help us get around some of the problematic parts of human nature:
• Frequently, we make value judgments about people based solely upon their appearance. We don’t take time to really know them. When we allow one’s physical appearance to shape our opinion without building rapport, we often arrive at faulty conclusions. With Facebook, however, we have opportunity to peruse the person’s information, interactions with others; personal, professional, and political tendencies; and the nature of the communities the people are constructing and nurturing.
Now we want to know what the digital natives themselves think. After all, they’re the ones who will shape the future. We thought we’d try something new with L&L’s Point/Counterpoint section by asking middle school and high school students to respond to this question in addition to ISTE members. But we need your help. We know it’s still summer break in some parts of the world, but do any of you have students who might be interested in this topic–and in being published in an international magazine–who would be willing to write a 450- to 500-word essay on either side of this argument? If so, please send them to the discussion forum on the L&L group page on the ISTE Community Ning (they’ll have to sign up for the community, but it’s free) or ask them to send their entries directly to me at abrichacek@iste.org as soon as possible so we can publish the winners in an upcoming issue of L&L.
L&L also needs more educators, administrators, and tech coordinators to weigh in on this topic for our Readers Respond section. Post your comments here and we’ll choose excerpts for our November issue. (Please include your job position and city/state/country.)
(pic from americancorner.hu)
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