FaceBook - A Social Requirement in Higher Education
February 1, 2006 | 37 Comments
Facebook is a social site targeted at people associated with colleges and universities. Its popularity has gone through the roof this academic year, a quick peak at Alexa and you’ll see how drastically its rank spikes.
During the winter semester Jenny was taking a class. A fellow student contacted her and informed her that she was the only one in the 15+ student class who did not have an account on Facebook. In fact, he was a bit annoyed at her for this and felt she really needed to create an account.
The level of involvement students feel with Facebook is astounding. This social software has become the preferred collaborative environment for them. By choice. Not by some academic decree or because people thought students needed to use it. They chose this product for themselves.
Wondering if this one example was an oddity and not truly indicative of an overall trend at Plymouth State or higher education in general? Casey got the following from Facebook: “There are 3,975 registered users at Plymouth State University. Like the other schools on the site, over 60% of them log in every 24 hours.”
That means approximately 2,385 users are logging in to Facebook each day. Our campus portal gets around 3,800 uniques daily and we make it difficult for students not to use that…
Tags: education, face book, facebook, higher ed, higher education, plymouth state, plymouth state university, social, social software, university, web 2.0