As announced earlier this morning, the Division of Student Affairs at NC State held, this afternoon, a very interesting panel discussion titled “The Facebook Phenomenon.”
The 2-hour webcast was really good (kudos to the AV, IT and Web teams!) and will be available online later this week. In the meantime, you can have a look at the PowerPoint presentation used during the discussion.
“The Facebook Phenomenon” at NC State – The panelists
As the headline of this post hinted, the organizers have even invited anybody interested in further discussion about the topic to join the “Facebook Phenomenon” group they created on… Facebook.
What a neat idea to follow up an event (definitely something to steal – I mean borrow – if you’re going to use the Facebook to promote your special events)!
Now, let me share a few of my notes.
Fred Stutzman shared some interesting stats about the research he conducted about the Facebook at UNC.
In 2005, he found that 85% of the incoming freshman class at UNC had already an account set up before the first day of class, proportion that grows to 94% a few months later.
Sarah Noell, Assistant Director, Computing Services (sorry didn’t get a chance to capture a screenshot of her), explained what NCSU does to educate students, faculty and staff on how to use social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace, basically giving workshops during orientation and providing information on how to show responsible behavior and be aware of privacy issues.
Paul Cousins, Director, Office of Student Conduct at NC State University explained that his office monitors Facebook for student misconduct as it does with other online tools.
He also confirmed that Facebook is used to find out more about prospective students by admission committees at NCSU.
Later in the discussion, an online participant from the University of California in Riverside asked if using Facebook in the hiring process of university staff couldn’t be a liability for the institution. With all the demographic information available on these profiles, institutions using Facebook early in their hiring process might be accused of discrimination.
Privacy issues, stalking and academic uses were also touched by the panel.
If you (or your boss) really need a good primer about this topic, I highly recommend that you watch the archived webcast.
Did you watch the webcast? Share your opinion by posting a comment!
I’ve posted a lengthy reaction to and discussion of this event.
In general, it was an excellent discussion that was well-prepared and very organized. However, I am disappointed that the panelists did not answer all of our questions and solve all of our problems. I do not blame them, however, as the questions were very good and I don’t think anyone has all of the answers about this emerging phenomenon. The panel did a good job of not getting bogged down in the specifics of Facebook and tried to generalize things which is a good approach to take with this phenomenon.
I’ve just read your post.
You provided a very good summary of the main points discussed by the panel – a great alternative to watching the webcast for anyone who doesn’t want to spend 2 hours in front of his/her screen.
Thanks for sharing with us!