Incase you’re confused, “myface” is a fancy-shmancy blend word for Myspace and Facebook, which always makes me laugh because it’s so telling of the true nature of these sites. They’re all about narcissism, egocentricity, and every individual’s inherent love for all things ‘me’. Or are they? I used to think so, but more and more I’m coming around to the idea that students are using these sites to connect in meaningful ways. It’s not altogether uncommon to hear students saying, “I’ll hit you up on facebook” when referring to collaborative assignments. That’s all well and good, but is it appropriate, or even possible, for teachers to start tapping into these pages as a classroom resource? That’s the question one teacher attempts to answer in her edublog titled “The Month of June“. Her post on the subject is “RSS for the Fall“, which seeks to determine whether or not RSS can be combined with the Myface pages in a way that will be both appropriate and worthwhile to her students. She notes:
“since these are the spaces that students visit each day, then these are the spaces in which to incorporate any class announcements or updates. The question left ahead of me: How?”
The author of this blog has been trying to teach her students about the benefits of RSS feeds. The problem she’s encountering is that after her students set up their Google Reader accounts they don’t use them. In other words, you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make them drink. Her students simply weren’t using RSS to stay up-to-date on the class blog–or anything else on the web. When it came time to make comments about their peers’ blogs, students would dust off their Google Reader passwords and check out what one another had to say, but they weren’t really learning anything about RSS or how to better manage a world of information on the web.
“So recently I’ve decided to take a bit more seriously the claim about email being for old people,” she notes.
While I don’t see email fading away as a generation of myfacers enters the workforce, I do think it’s important to recognize that students are using these pages in its place–at least for the time being. By incorporating RSS into myface, students would have a direct link to more than just their peers’ thoughts on music, their ilike lists, their lame bumper stickers, their addicted to “The Office” applications, and their “I Flip My Pillow Over To Get To The Cold Side” group (of which I am a proud member). They would have all their classroom resources, and indeed, their classmates themselves, coming to their preferred digital doorstep–and all in a way that wouldn’t seem so invasive or intrusive as to denature the pages they use and love.
Although this seems like an elegant solution to teaching RSS, I’m not so sure it works out all the bugs;
“Are these widgets/applications the best way to utilize RSS? Probably not. Are they appropriate for keeping the subscriptions to all of their classmates’ blogs? Probably not. What about students who don’t have a myspace or facebook?”
The whole concept of using RSS with Myface, at the very least, deserves a shot. As she points out, using them in tandem with Google Reader could be one solution. For information on how to get RSS applications going on your (or your students) Myface pages, visit http://www.springwidgets.com/widgets/view/23.
Article in full — “RSS for the Fall“, August 2007.
3 Comments
Comments feed for this article
April 8th, 2008 at 8:48 am
This is a really interesting idea, it’s always good to incorporate school and technology into things that students are already interested in. The only thing is that, like you said, even though it’s there that doesn’t mean that the students will use it. I would be worried about taking all of the fun out of it by making it an academic resource. If we do this will students lose iterest? Maybe not, but you certainly would have to be tactful in the way that you incorporated it becuase I think it might be an uphill climb.
April 15th, 2008 at 8:23 am
[...] 2. Brad’s Blog: http://mypedablogy.edublogs.org/2008/03/11/myface-and-rss-are-they-hooking-up/#comments [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 9:26 am
I completely agree about the level of narcissism on social networking sites, I am guilty of that as well. I do think that social networking sites can valuable educational tools, but it is a common attitude on these type of sites to go to a lot of effort to express oneself but have little interest in spending any real time look at someone elses interests or work.
I’m sure this is something that could easily be overcome in the classroom by doing something like requiring students to read eachother’s blogs and post comments on them. Hmmm. I’m glad I thought of that!