Lifestyles
Facebook Frenzy
November 1, 2007
By Craig Bodenschatz
Despite academic implications, Facebook often takes precedence over paying attention in class.
Trendy online social communication sites are some of the fastest growing networks for interpersonal contact, especially among students. But in-class access by high school students and college-age individuals presents significant concerns and potentially detrimental effects for scholastic success.
At MBU, the popular network is Facebook, which began as a college student-only network. Facebook has become the preferred method of communication, even over text messaging, for event invitations and personal requests. Aaron Holman, a business administration and management major at MBU, used Facebook to invite friends to an upcoming holiday event.
One MBU student admitted to spending 15 or more minutes on Facebook in a 50-minute class, equaling 30 percent of the class time, but claimed that his grades remain unaffected. He said, “If the teachers would do more than just read slide presentations, me and my classmates wouldn’t be on there so much.” According to this student, the average age group for classroom users is between 18 and 20 years old and that, in a given class, three to four individuals out of six with laptops would be accessing Facebook simultaneously.
Concerning Facebook activity in the clasroom, Dr. Keith Beutler, associate professor of history at MBU, said he “would like to think that it happens relatively infrequently.” Since students are using laptops turned away from the teacher, detection is increasingly difficult. When the issue came to student honesty, Beutler expressed a philosophy of personal responsibility for both educators and students: “We have a reasonable role in trying to prevent it to a degree. But we have to do our jobs and students must do theirs.”
Dr. John Han, chair of the Humanities department, stated that Facebook activity by students can be distracting. “I wonder what they are doing,” he said, “but I have no way of checking.”
Another student excitedly discussed Facebook exploits in an unnamed class: “We have a six-computer group of 10 people. We have a ‘thread’ going about how we don’t pay attention in class. But I still am getting an A in the class.” A fellow classmate added: “The only reason everyone in the class doesn’t do it is because they don’t have computers or they’re not sitting next to someone who has one.”
Taylor Parsons, a behavioral science major at MBU, went further to detail this widespread activity. Although she doesn’t bring a laptop in class herself, she said, “Basically, even if you have a laptop, you’re not taking notes the whole time anyway, and the teachers know that.” In a given course, she explained that all three of the laptop users accessed Facebook actively throughout the class period, but “they minimize it when the teacher walks by.” She added later, "But I believe taking notes in class is overrated.”
Due to its ease of access and youth-geared format, MySpace gained much attention as the first and largest social-networking site. Many other copycat sites sprang up like Hi5, Bebo and Facebook. Originally, only .edu email accounts could be linked to Facebook, one of the newest and fastest-growing networks, but with its corporate takeover, .com and .org users can now open accounts as well.
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