New modes of everyday com-munication—textual, visual,audio and video—are already

part of almost every high school andcollege student’s social life. But cansuch social networking principles beeffective in an educational setting?

At the Rhode Island School ofDesign (RISD) where I teach, studentsspend a lot of time on Facebook andother social networking sites. There isalso an emerging interest in sharingacademic achievements through socialsites. RISD students have populated a rich repository of e-Portfolios in adirectory (http://risd.digication.com/portfolio/directory.digi) which allows

faculty, alumni, prospective studentsand prospective employers to browsethrough student work. Giving studentsthe ability to share their work in thisway transforms them into authors and publishers. Brian Hutcheson, who recently completed a master’s inteaching at RISD, created a program e-Portfolio as part of his degreerequirement and an e-Portfolio show-casing a specific lesson on toy designhe created while student teaching. (http://risd.digication.com/curvinmccabe6/Home/.) This e-Portfolio,which was shared publicly in RISD’se-Portfolio directory, caught the attention of a highly regarded art

textbook publishing company, DavisPublications, and was featured in theirlatest edition of School Arts magazine.Connections and opportunities like thisarise often when the work of teachersand students is shared beyond theclassroom through social technology.

In addition, schools and collegesincreasingly employ new kinds ofcommunications such as blogs and wikis.

Blogs. Blogs are simple online journals with entries organizedchronologically—a structure manypeople find intuitive and easy to follow. New content is displayedprominently at the top, while olderinformation gets archived.

Social Technology as a New Medium in the ClassroomJEFFREY YAN

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Counting members in the hundredsof millions, online social net-working communities such as

MySpace and Facebook may provenearly as transformative as the 1876invention of the telephone. Creating a MySpace or Facebook profile is free and making online “friends” iseasy—if you’re under 30. But students’online identities and friendships comeat a price, as job recruiters, schooladministrators, law enforcement officers and sexual predators sign on and start searching.

MySpace is routinely ranked amongthe top three most popular websites in America. The site was founded in2003 by Tom Anderson, a graduatestudent at UCLA. Two years later,Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

purchased MySpace for a reported$327 million. Beyond its financial success, MySpace boasts an interna-tional audience with more users thanany other networking site in the world.

In New England, however,Facebook is a local favorite amongcollege students and recent graduates,perhaps because it was founded in theregion, by then Harvard sophomoreMark Zuckerberg. The first month thesite went “live” in 2004, half of Harvard’sundergraduates signed up. Its popularityspread to other Boston-area campusesincluding MIT, Boston University andBoston College. By December 2004,the number of registered Facebookusers surpassed one million. Facebookbegan by catering to undergraduatesand for many years restricted mem-

bership by requiring all users to havea “.edu” email account. In recentyears, Facebook has opened its site to a wider audience in order to servethe growing demand for online social networking. Yet, Facebook remainsthe most popular site among NewEngland college students.

Other sites such as Friendster,LiveJournal and YouTube offer addi-tional means for users to “broadcast”their innermost thoughts and secretsacross the World Wide Web. To join, a user needs only an emailaddress and a willingness to share his or her “profile” with other users.Profiles usually include pictures andpersonal descriptions, music andvideo clips, plus information aboutthe user’s relationship status, school

Youthful IndiscretionsShould Colleges Protect Social Network Users from Themselves and Others?

DANA L. FLEMING

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THE NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION WINTER 2008 27

THE NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF HIGHER EDUCATION FALL 2007 29

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There is no practical way for colleges to monitor the content of these sites, as students’ profilesand postings are changing constantly.It would take a full-time staff workingaround the clock to scratch the surfaceof a single network. An aggressivemonitoring approach can also backfire.When students find out that a networkis being monitored by administrators,they frequently change networks,password-protect their profile orgroup or post misleading informationto confuse and frustrate administrators,(e.g., one student advertised a frat partyat a specific dorm room, only to leavea “gotcha” note for campus police).

While a blanket monitoringapproach is infeasible, if not counter-productive, a targeted review ofonline social networking sites can bea good thing. For example, when astudent exhibits signs of distress, areview of his or her online profile orblog may be appropriate. A review ofa student’s profile may also be appro-priate where that student is involvedin a disciplinary proceeding. Courtstreat people’s online postings as

evidence in criminal proceedings, and college and university lawyersroutinely check students’ online profiles. It stands to reason then, that schools are free to use contentfrom these sites in their own judiciary proceedings. Colleges that wish tocreate a policy specially tailored toonline social networking policiesshould review Cornell’s University’s“Thoughts on Facebook,” which cautions students about the personalrisks and legal ramifications of onlinesocial networking, while at the sametime acknowledging the benefits andpopular appeal of such sites.

In this era of aggressive data-miningand total information access, students’privacy is in peril. Advertisers are particularly interested in students’personal information, as they try totailor ads to individual users. Forexample, a restaurant may create anonline advertisement based not onlyon the student’s geographic location,but also by noting that one of their“friends” is a regular customer. Thistype of targeted advertising helps toexplain the financial success of sites

like MySpace and Facebook whereonline advertisers can pay as muchfor online advertising space as they do for commercial slots onprimetime TV.

Under the Family EducationalRights and Privacy Act (FERPA), colleges have a responsibility not todivulge students’ personal information,sell their names, phone numbers andemail addresses to advertisers or otherwise violate their privacy rights.But when students post their mostintimate secrets online, how canschools protect students’ privacy?

Though many students believe that the information they post onlineis “private,” it’s not—and the simplestway to address the liabilities posed by these sites is to treat them like any other university activity, subjectto the school’s code of conduct andapplicable state and federal laws.

Dana L. Fleming is a Boston-area attorney specializing in higher education law. Email: dfleming@seyfarth.com.

Social Technology continued

Additionally, blogs offer RSS (realsimple syndication) feeds that allowanyone to “subscribe” to be notifiedwhen new blog posts become avail-able. Comments connected to individ-ual postings on the blog give theauthor the opportunity to receivefeedback from visitors.

Blogs are great tools for class inter-action. Teachers can choose to have one blog to post teachingmaterials, in forms of images, filesand links. Comments can be postedby teachers, classmates, parents oranyone who has been given access.Receiving feedback about courseworkfrom not just a teacher, but also peersor possibly the outside world can bevery empowering to students.

They are easy to set up and usuallyfree of charge. Popular blogging platforms used in classrooms include

Blogger (www.blogger.com) andEduBlogs (www.edublogs.org).

Blogs can be networked and createdby teachers and students to form acommunity of blogs where students ina single class or even all students on agiven campus can each present theirown findings and discoveries. A colleague of mine, David Bogen,created a rich, active community withblogs at Emerson College (http://www.digital-culture.com). Students are pub-lishing their work, thoughts and ideason a regular basis. For example, stu-dents in the “Digital Culture” learningcommunity post all their writing andmultimedia work from several classeswithin the blog/portfolio environment,and use the course blogs for organiz-ing collaborative projects.

Students are publishing their work,thoughts and ideas on a regular basis.

Students are very capable of separatingacademic and social contexts. Emersonstudents use the blogs to collaborateacademically, but Facebook to socialize.

Wikis. Teachers who want theirstudents to be able to work togetherin an online publishing environmentand need collaborative editing toolsfor students look to the wiki.

Wikis are often used for group-basedwriting projects, collaborative note-taking or brainstorming. Teachers canset up wikis for groups of students,allowing them to give feedback withequal footing, make suggestions andchanges and jot down ideas. Everyoneis an author of the wiki at the sametime. Authors can start with veryinformal ideas and gradually edit and create drafts of their writing to befurther edited and shaped by other authors of the wiki.

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The best-known example isWikipedia (www.wikipedia.com), the online encyclopedia written collaboratively by users around the world. Its global popularity is a testament to the strength that a collective has when united to communicate, share and build content together. At a much smallerand more controlled level, the capabilities of a wiki in the class-room can broaden the learning experience, as student groups buildrich, deep content over time. A greatexample can be found at BrownUniversity’s wiki site (https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/dashboard.action), topics from “Biomed” to“Men’s Club Soccer” can be found,with students collaborating acrosscampus. In an interesting wiki createdfor a Chemistry Language course,students are building a collaborativereference of chemistry language terminology (https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/CHEM/Chemistry+Language). Scrolling down the page,readers see a growing list of termsthat students submitted with questionsas well as instructor prompts, audiorecordings of students using this terminology and chemistry equations.

Commercially available Wiki soft-ware such as PBWiki (www.pbwiki.com)and WikiSpaces (www.wikispaces.com)are very popular in the classroomtoday because of their ease of setup(usually 15 minutes or less) and theirinherent flexibility and collaborativeediting features. In Brown’s ChemistryLanguage wiki, the instructor createsthe structure of the wiki, invites students to join and then provides the students with guidelines on whatkind of content should be submittedand how often (https://wiki.brown.edu/confluence/display/CHEM/About+This+Site). Providing the students withinformation about the purpose andformat of the wiki leads to greatersuccess within a course.

Online Learning Communities.Teachers looking for school-specificcollaboration tools may be interestedin established, educationally basedsocial networks and online learningcommunities that can address school-or district-wide communications. Anexample would be Elgg’s educationalsocial network (www.elgg.net) thatleverages blogs. Another example is Digication’s learning community(www.digication.com), which is basedon e-Portfolios. These educationallybased communities have safeguards in place to eliminate the dangersfound in open social networks, likeMySpace and Facebook. These net-works are administrated by schoolsgiving them the ability to control thelevel of openness, define permissionsettings and disallow outsiders whodo not have passwords keeping thenetwork safe and secure.

One unique feature that Elgg offers allows schools to run and hosttheir own social network locally ontheir own servers. If a school has thenecessary expertise in supportingsuch a network, staff can downloadthe software free of charge and havecomplete control over the underlyingcode. Having access to the underlyingcode enables schools that prefer to beable to customize and manage softwareonsite using school owned hardwareand IT resources to have that flexibility.

Digication’s e-Portfolio basedonline learning communities giveteachers and students in K-12 andhigher education institutions the ability to personalize and share their content. At RISD’s Art + DesignEducation Department, the studentsutilize e-Portfolio templates, whichprovide areas for syllabi, assignments,completed assignments with reflec-tions by students and then evaluation comments by faculty. The e-Portfoliocontains an archive of courses andassignments for each student for theentire degree program. From this

documentation, faculty provide regu-larly scheduled critiques throughoutthe program. The student may thenuse the information to create a ‘job search’ e-Portfolio. An exampleof such an e-Portfolio, also referredto as a Program Portfolio can be seen at http://risd.digication.com/mwall/Home.

Collaboration MotivatesParticipation. The new generation of Web 2.0 solutions are easier to use, more engaging and are making a larger impact upon collaborationand communication in the classroom than complex technologies of the past.Technologies adopted in schoolstoday, including blogs, wikis, socialnetworking and online learning communities, are keeping teachersand students connected in and out ofclass. They are creating opportunitiesfor groups to share, collaborate,showcase and grow together. In addition, they allow exchange ofinformation and ideas not only withinthe confines of a classroom, butacross schools, districts, states andthe world. Even 10th grade computer science classes are taking advantageof social technologies for cross-cultural exchanges.

Teachers are amazed at how simple tools for sharing work andideas can positively transform theclassroom. Students who may avoidlive class participation are leveragingnew communication forms to becomemore active and “vocal” in a virtualclass. The freedom to publish andshare ideas creates a learning envi-ronment that empowers and motivatesboth teachers and students.

Jeffrey Yan is co-founder ofDigication. He teaches a graduatecourse at Rhode Island School of Designon integrating technology into the class-room. Email: jeff@digication.com.

S O C I A L N E T W O R K I N G

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