Two Week Review of Using a Teaching Facebook Page

I think it was only two days into this MOOC before I decided to take the plunge and start a Facebook page for my students. For those of you who still refuse to use it--for ideological, financial, temporal, or ludological reasons--a Facebook Page is different from a Facebook Profile. My profile is still kept private this way and the profiles of my students are kept private from me as well. The page is like an organization or club--students can "Like" the page without "Friending" me, so student privacy is kept intact while at the same time engaging students in an online environment that they seem more comfortable with than Laulima with an automatic notification capability.

For many of my students, the idea of going on Laulima everyday is very alien, but the idea of daily Facebooking seems like nothing. At first, I was a bit stuck for what to post, but then I remembered a bunch of writing links and grammar webcomics from The Oatmeal. If anyone else in the MOOC is considering the use of Facebook Pages, here is a link to mine. I'd also love some feedback from others here who felt the same impulse and also started a Facebook Page for teaching.

Muchas gracias!

Inspired!

Since I have a B.S. in Secondary Educational Studies, I am quite familiar with the traditional Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning.

I remember this...

However, this week's materials introduced me to a revisioning of this pyramid that I find much more intuitively appealing.

I want to go to there.

One lesson I took away from the materials was the idea of user-created content and the kinds of environments where this creation is productive for student writers. Every semester, it seems that I encounter the same attitude of writing to the void rather than writing to actual people, yet I know how savvy they can be about rhetorical strategizing when they use it in their lives and social networks like Facebook.

So in the interests of promoting student risk-taking for user-generated content creation, I made a Facebook page specifically for teaching to give my students a place to congregate informally. I also have critical thinking themes with assigned and optional reading lists, and am going to encourage students to also find their own examples each week to post on this page.

Even though I am a fairly young college teacher, students still seem intimidated by me until I've had time to show them that I am not that intimidating. However, I feel this sort of interaction was lacking in my last online class and I want to improve my relations with students in a way that makes them comfortable to engage with the risks of creation in writing.

I am also giving serious consideration to including some form of service-learning element--particularly for online courses where intrinsic engagement is so infrequent. My hope is that including a real-world contact point for applying the lessons from class with increase student motivation, not just to write, but to write for a real-world audience.

Tenia un trabajo!