Group items tagged

I don’t see a problem with accepting a students’ friend request. And you can do so as a professor, and still make your profile as personal as you want it for your friends. How? Facebook has amazing privacy settings. You can make a friend list (all students, for instance) and then restrict how much of your profile they can see, and how much of your activity they can see. Students can see my basic work, school and contact info, but cannot see my status updates, photos tagged of me, or what my friends write on my wall.

There are ways to interact with students via Facebook without being friends. Facebook provides the Groups feature, but I recommend building your own application or choosing an application provider like ourselves. Applications allow users to interact with one another outside of being Facebook Friends. In our app, Instructors can send gifts, post on walls, share links, see status updates, and play a name game — all without being friends.

As someone who has built an LMS on Facebook, I can tell you the more you move towards “instructional tool” the more resistance and less use you will end up with.