Facebook in Higher Education

A little facebook history to preface today's entry. Originally launched as The Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg created and launched the site while he was a student at Harvard University, so Facebook has been intended for use of University students for social means since its inception.

In my undergraduate days the site was getting started, had gained wide spread popularity and was still a campus only network, where you had to have a email address with a participating university to get logged on. This created a feel of exclusivity on the site. As users built their networks, they were comfortable 'friending' people because it was all in good fun.

These day's facebook is much much more than that. It is not just your friends from school, its your boss, your brother, your mother and the girl who is a waitress at the bar you always go to. This is a mixed blessing. You can easily get in touch with people if you lost a phone number, can't reach them on email, or have simply been out of touch. But it also means that your old boss see's that photo that the waitress tagged you in from Friday night. See where I am going with this?

In Rotman Orientation, we were told about the do's and don'ts of recruiting. One thing they touched on was to pay attention to your facebook. The recruiter you are talking to may be curious enough to see what kind of social life you have before they call you in for an interview, and they may see the aforementioned picture and decide they are looking for someone more 'serious.'

Now that I have outlined the facebook evils, let me touch on the great things about facebook. When I had applied and been offered admission to Rotman, I also searched the facebook world to see if there was a group. The wonderful program services people had set one up that required all members be part of the incoming full time MBA class. This meant that as many as 6 months before the program even started, and I was even living in Toronto, I was trading messages & moving tips with other students from class. In effect, we met online.

Now that we have (almost) all met, and are normalizing into a routine and studying (which means procrastinating) we are having a new facebook world. In planning a few social events these past few weeks, I have shamelessly used facebook as a tool to communicate, and while it is great, there is a fine line between spamming your new friends and including them in events.

The solution is a facebook group for fun - social events for members of the Rotman Community. We can all host events for everyone, if you are looking for someone who wants to go for sushi or plan a ski trip, we can communicate with each other there. By starting this group, and adding on many many admins, we are hoping to have a many to many communication flow.

So far over 150 members of our class have signed up, factoring for people not on facebook, and people not interested in hearing about every social event, we have a pretty great sign up record. Here's to hoping the 'model' works and that it can be passed on from year to year.