Group items tagged

Fortunately, you don’t have to be Facebook friends to interact on Facebook. In a guide produced in partnership with Facebook, Facebook for Educators, Facebook expert Linda Fogg Phillips, educational media consultant Derek Baird and behavior psychologist BJ Fogg recommend using Groups and Pages to communicate with students:

As a teacher & tech guy at a school, using Facebook for school feels like taking the kids to the mall for class. Too distracting. Even they think so, & readily admit it to me.

Simply, it’s time to admit that the Internet has changed the way we do scholarship and will go on changing it. There is so much inertia in the academic world, so much affection for fussy old ways. People love getting all the brackets and commas and abbreviations just so. Perhaps it gives them a feeling of accomplishment. Professors torment students over the tiniest details of bibliographical information, when anyone wishing to check can simply put the author name and title in any Internet search engine. A doctoral student hands in a brilliant essay and the professor complains that the translator’s name has not been mentioned in a quotation from a recent French novel, though of course since the book is recent there is only one translation of the novel and in any event anyone checking the cited edition will find the translator’s name in the book.

Still, I have to admit that e-books are better than paper books in some situations. Here are five reasons I’ve switched to e-books, some of the time: