If you missed it, about a week and a half ago, Pennsylvania's Harrisburg University of Science and Technology imposed a campus-wide, weeklong ban on Facebook, Twitter and IM’s. (Full story here.)
Ban all Social Media access at a University for one week? Now that’s a Social experiment! See what I did there? ‘Social’ experi…anyway, who thought this was realistic? I didn’t. Like I mentioned in my report about Social Media in the classroom, kids are smarter and sneakier than us – they will find a way.
Eric Darr, who is conducting the experiment, pretty much admitted to that fact before it started, saying that he was curious about what lengths people will go to in order to stay connected. “From a technology perspective, there are ways to get around the block that may expose them to spyware and adware, as they try not to go through the firewall. We'll see how clever people were and what they tried.” Well, several days into the withdrawal, Darr said that by his own observations, the group of students who are following the rules of Social Media abstinence falls within the 10 to 15 percent range.
Hey, I’m not knocking this Darr guy. It was more ambitious than the making of Inception to try and pull this off. And, I’m sure in ‘failure’ we can all learn something. Like, maybe teachers, schools and classrooms should have more of a Social Media presence. Maybe Facebook should offer functionality to support educational systems, such as the uploading and downloading of coursework. Facebook, after all, started in a dorm room at Harvard. ~ p
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