Marci Alboher has posted a great piece on the Shifting Careers blog at nytimes.com.  In it, she wonders about how people use Facebook and other social networking sites to connect with a new type of friend, the kind of might not even be their friends in the real world.  Which is fine, but how do you distinguish between the two classes of acquaintances?  Are online friends worth as much as offline friends?  What about online friends that you later meet and convert to offline friends?

I got into the Facebook thing this summer when I was getting ready to leave Edinburgh.  Looking for an easy way to stay in touch with my new friends, I realized that they were on Facebook far more than they were using email or anything else.  And it made perfect sense–with Facebook, you can send messages (what we used to call email), share photos, leave notes, play games, post videos.  Pretty much anything you’d want to do online, actually, can be accomplished on Facebook.  All it’s missing are a decent RSS aggregator and document sharing (a la Google Docs) and it’d be unstoppable.

Our school has spent a lot* of money on a fancy new portal system.  The idea is to provide one-stop shopping for the information that various members of our school community need to succeed.  For teachers, this means access to our school email, our attendance and grade reporting database, our Individualized Student Intervention Plans, our class calendars, &c.  For students, it means access to their individual class pages, homework assignments, a digital locker for submitting work, and a calendar for all of their classes in one place.  And parents can track their students’ grades and easily contact teachers.

It’s actually pretty cool, in theory.  I’ve played around with it a little (not as much as I am supposed to have, as a member of the Technology Working Group) and have found it clunky so far.  I have high hopes that it will become more useful.  It needs to have the capability for teachers to add RSS feeds for their individual classes that aren’t either the local newspaper or Board of Ed press releases, and it should have some blogging and wiki capability, for starters.  To be honest, it probably should just be run via Moodle or something equally free and useful.

But then I was thinking: why don’t we just use the system that already exists, and that most of our students are already using and are comfortable with?  Leaving aside the fact that for some reason (and please, someone give me a good reason) it’s banned from our school network, why not use Facebook?

Think about it.  It already has these capabilities:

  • Quick and easy private/group messaging
  • Public commenting
  • Media(photo/video) sharing
  • Mobile access
  • Automatic RSS feeds
  • Rudimentary RSS readers/aggregators

These, meanwhile, are the apps I think Facebook’d need in order to compete as an educational platform.  If you know of any of these that already exist for Facebook, definitely let me know and I’ll try them out.

  • File sharing/dropbox (even better if it was something similar to Google Docs so students could collaborate on group assignments)
  • Some sort of homework calendar
  • Grade tracking

So I know I said I wouldn’t be writing so much about edtech stuff, but this has been on my mind.  Apologies in advance to Dan and anyone else who finds my lack of restraint disturbing.

* We’re a very wealthy district, and it still seems like a lot.  That’s what I mean by “a lot.”