Awhile back I posted a preliminary list of assumptions for Red Rover. As we are in the process of gathering up our ideas for discussions tomorrow at our first advisory meeting, adding to that list seems appropriate.
The goal with this is to state our ideas plainly. Or failing that, put out some rough drafts of thoughts to get to plain later. All of these ideas get baked into the software and strategy. With a list, our advisors and stakeholders can be clear on what they agree with and what they don't. We can then focus the discussion and learn.
On Facebook and social integration with academic integration.
Fred Stutzman has a draft paper where he questions the wisdom of using Facebook for class management due to challenges of "moving instruction into student spaces of sociality." In short, students get weird when professors hang out in their bedrooms. So let's not.
I'm really looking forward to talking this out with Fred tomorrow, but here's my take:
Education is social. It is peer social.
Younger students want to socially integrate first. What matters is the feeling. They lead with the "where are my peers who I can hang with / feel comfortable with?" question.
As we get older, we start to prioritize common interests. Knitting comes first, friends come later. I want to find the entrepreneurs in NY. I assume I will like a few, but I lead with the topic. Being uncomfortable is worth the networking benefit.
Our prioritization of "social" shifts as we get older. Once our emotional needs are met (or dismissed), we socialize for other reasons and reduce the prioritization of comfort. We call it growth.
NASPA, ACPA, APCA, and NACA are all banging on about "Learning Reconsidered" where one of the arguments is that the school must help facilitate the interaction between the Social, Academic, and Institutional context. When this happens it creates holistic, transformative learning, the ultimate goal. They give "service learning" as an example of an activity that blends all three contexts.
More challenging, and incredibly rewarding, is the integration of the social into your standard classroom. Learning Communities are one approach.
Online folks call a social / learning group Personal Learning Networks and the web folks' tools offer incredible flexibility, speed, and reach. This makes the conference far more social ("we've been twitterin' for 6 months!").
Fred's right in that professors do not belong in a student's bedroom. "Uncomfortable" is not the type of emotional engagement we are looking for.
I believe, as Fred noted, this is less of an issue when students are more professional (higher levels, greater maturity) with a more goal/topic prioritization.
Further, this "I want to maintain my party space in public" (and 500 FB friends is public, ask Ms. New Jersey) idea is an immature and limiting desire. It certainly won't help with job networking. So it is a school's responsibility to gently move the student along the transformative learning and maturation process. At some point this means helping them learn to effectively expand, for the sake of their engagement and networking, their binary ideas of work and social.
Students can use tools or privacy settings to create their small rooms for close friends. This is how Fred uses Twitter - it's a choice, bonding over bridging capital to reduce cognitive "is this appropriate?" strain.
We do this as adults. If students don't learn how to think and use tools like adults in college, when will they learn?
Beyond teaching context negotiation (and we can debate when is a good time) I believe that working with educational data in Facebook has two important benefits:
1) Convenience. People do more of what is easy. The lack of another login matters. One click from where I am already matters. FB groups are easier to navigate than Blackboard.
2) Peer socializing. Not the same as socializing with a professor. Peer connectedness leads to higher engagement. Educational environmental design matters. Your typical large room classroom is set with all seats facing the front. Facebook is inherently social graphy. This is a good thing.
This does not necessarily mean only using FB groups. It could mean using a page and porting the feeds into the page. I'm not sure what the correct technical implementation is for blending contexts, but I do believe it is way too early for institutions to abandon Facebook.
On Groups:
College is a series of groups with different sizes, structures and goals. (Student Body, Class, Major, Residence Hall, Class, Student Group, friend cliques.)
Colleges spend most of their money managing these groups. (Think paperwork and leadership, both big $) The old model used to be: Bigger Groups = Bigger Expense. Grouping finding, organizing, and communication tools are dramatically reducing the cost of grouping.
Smart students are creating their own learning networks outside of the school. Network reach has a high economic utility. Students should be taught how to network at the local and global scale.
Seeing who is like you in any new group helps put people at ease. ("Whew, someone is weird just like me!") Ease increases engagement and involvement. This is why Red Rover is including group member matching.
There is no one right tool set for all types of groups. Instead, Red Rover focuses on finding and joining groups (like a school specific Meetup) and then aggregates feeds from whatever compilation of free group tools the members / leaders of the group decide to use. (I.e. Red Rover is fine with a group using a blog, a wiki, friend feed, twitter, etc. as long as the tool generates a feed.)
RSS, XML, and API's will be used to plug tools into Red Rover groups.
Changing Education Practices:
Free tools (Web 2.0) are innovating in the aggregate much faster than established LMS providers such as Blackboard. Innovative professors (my standard top of the head list: M. Wesch, Fred Stutzman, BJ Fogg) are mixing and matching these FREE tools to create rich classroom experiences. As these leaders explore best practices, other faculty will follow. New faculty, who used these types of tools throughout their graduate experience, will use free tools without thinking twice.
Institutional Information Management Systems:
Various departments in the institution tend to have their own software solutions (i.e. career center, alumni relations, activities, advising, learning management, enrollment, etc.) most of these pieces do not talk to each other.
Most schools are incapable of telling a student everything the school knows about them. Academic transcripts are the norm. Activities transcripts are still fairly cutting edge. What about career? What about mentors? What about preferences?
Large tech vendors are starting to say "one college" and Banner and College Management Software will both sell the school a module for everything that supposedly works together. I do not have experience with either of these vendors, but I don't think the top-down bigger more complicated solution is the most interesting solution.
Far more interesting, I believe, is pushing the data management to the end user. In the exact same way that Google is changing the handling of medical records, and for pretty much the same effect: efficiency and improved experience.
This data used to be "expensive" (in the broad economic sense of money and time) to manage. So the school would take on this expense and buy expensive software to make the process more efficient.
If web tools, Facebook, wiki's, blogs, delicious, friendfeed, twitter, etc. become standard use for organizing and managing groups on campus, and they all can feed into a student's record system, then the management of this data becomes nearly free. For a great example of passive information management, see mint.com. Josh Koppleman calls this trend the implicit web. Your data works for you without your effort.
If the students control the data, they can do whatever they want with it. This gets us around the lawyers that so weigh down the institution with terms like "duty of care" and FERPA. It amounts to Universities saying to students: "We know you will use your own tools and be online. We want to help you be successful, and not limit you. Therefore it's best for you to have your data, because if we have it, your options and networking are limited. As a college, we are severely encumbered (and expensive!) when we try to work with your information. It's best in your hands."
Higher Education Software Vendors:
Most tech vendors see the institution as their customer. This is wrong. The student is their customer. Ask students how they feel about WebCT. [Full disclosure: our marketing is 90% focused on faculty interests, we are working to correct this.]
Because of the institution focus, most vendors focus on control, increasing the "expense" (broad economic definition) of student use. Now that students have many options for grouping and information, they will increasingly choose the easier option. Leaving both the software vendor, and the school, out.
Software vendors should take more responsibility for use of their product. If the students hate it, or just don't use it, that should not just be the school's problem.
With the room about half full a student walked in wearing a torn Grateful Dead shirt, but I couldn't see his face to make eye contact and say hello because his head was drooped to his chest. His shoulders hung low and his feet barley lifted off the ground as he moved past. All his non verbals said he wasn't excited to be there and he hadn't made any friends yet. As he passed me in our greeting line, I pointed to his shirt and said, "Nice shirt." He looked up and smiled quickly and went on to his seat off to the side by himself. 
