[PRL] Working in Facebook

[Mitchell Wand]

Followup:

There were 5 comments, of which three were interesting:

  Sarah Milstein <http://www.toccon.com/>   [07.10.07 10:41 AM]
>
> Great post, Peter. One note: before they get to college, many if not most
> students don't use email regularly. They text and IM but consider email a
> formal communication. Colleges are thus finding that they need to teach
> email skills, because that's today's business communication norm.
>
> It'll be interesting to see if email fades as more people who are
> comfortable with other electronic forms of communication start graduating
> into the workplace.
>

and

  Greg Wilson <http://www.third-bit.com/blog>   [07.10.07 01:37 PM]
>
> Observations like Sarah's are why we're planning to integrate IM into
> DrProject (www.drproject.org), a classroom-oriented software project
> management portal (think SourceForge for beginners ;-). Lots of young grads
> from CS use IM instead of email for "real" team conversations, then switch
> to email to talk to their managers; as a result, most of the "why we built
> it this way" is lost, because the IM conversations aren't archived,
> searchable, integrated with the project's ticketing system and wiki, etc.
> The major hurdles we're facing in this aren't technical, but social --- I'll
> post to http://www.third-bit.com/blog this fall as the experiment unfolds.
>

and

> Martin Kelley <http://www.martinkelley.com/>   [07.10.07 03:05 PM]
>
> Thanks for the interesting post Peter. I'm fascinated by the culture
> shifts we're starting to see with Web 2.0 services as the kids who grew up
> taking this stuff for granted use it in more institutional contexts.
>
> It's not much of an exaggeration to say that everyone in my social circle
> under 30 has a facebook account and no one over 40 does. I'm 40 myself and
> when I registered a few months ago I was only the fourth person from my
> college graduating class of 1600. When I recently evesdropped on a Facebook
> "Wall-to-Wall" conversation and heard 20 year olds complaining how hard it
> was to organize things because the old people don't do IM I determined to
> start doing IM more. There's quite a generational divide brewing.
>


 So have any of you all observed these phenomena in our students?

-- Is it true that our freshmen haven't used email regularly, as Sarah
posits?
-- Is it true that our undergrads use IM for "real" conversations on
projects?   What about our grad students?

--Mitch




On 7/10/07, Mitchell Wand <wand at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
>
> 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
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
HTML attachment scrubbed and removed