[PRL] Working in Facebook

[Mitchell Wand]

 http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/07/working_in_face.html

Excerpt:

I happened to be sitting at a corner where some of the younger folks,
> primarily grad students, were sitting. Somehow, Facebook came up in the
> conversation, and within minutes, there were a flurry of invites,
> acceptances, and the creation of a SCI group for our own internal
> communication. Like a fast moving blizzard, the formation of our new
> micro-network was over almost as quickly as it began. Notably, none of the
> older SCI participants - not a Luddite among them - had Facebook accounts,
> nor were they carrying portable electronics that would have permitted
> real-time participation.
>
> What I learned, and what was new to me, was just how intrinsic the use of
> Facebook is today among younger scholars - grad students and junior faculty
> - in their scholarship and teaching. Facebook, for now, is often the place
> where they work, collaborate, share, and plan. Grad students may run student
> projects using Facebook groups; they may communicate amongst each other in
> inter-institutional (multi-university) research projects; they may announce
> speakers and special events to their communities.
>
> I've been enmeshed recently in increasingly agonized conferences that
> concern themselves with "re-thinking scholarly communication" and grappling
> with understanding what tools might be used to facilitate new models of peer
> review, or facilitate research collaboration, or teaching -- and all the
> while - of course - it has been happening anyway, using widely available
> tools that provide the flexibility and leverage that scholars have been
> seeking.
>

This was just posted. It will be interesting to see what  shows up in the
comments.

--Mitch
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