Historical Methods

Here is a link to an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education on professors using Facebook. I would be very interested to know what you think about this issue.

In my own case, I signed up for Facebook last year when I was preparing to lead my first European study tour. I wanted to create a group for the students going on the tour and it worked quite well as a way for them to meet one another prior to departure and to stay in touch since. I’ve also created the group I Love Eastern Europe in the GMU network as a way to bring GMU students together who have an interest in things East European. Thus far, 50 students have joined this group, close to half of whom are not my students (or former students).

Other than inviting students to join one of these groups, I don’t send out “friend requests” to students, but am always willing to add a student of mine as a friend when requested.

Finally, I have found that some students respond much more quickly to messages in Facebook than they do to email, so it has turned out to be a good way to communicate with certain students.

But is this creepy, as the student quoted in the article contends? Should faculty members stay out?

That train has left the station, of course, because now anyone can join Facebook and millions have, so it has already ceased to be a closed space for students (actually it never was a student only space–anyone with a campus email address could always join, but it seemed like a student only space for a while).

In any case, I’d be very interested in your take on this issue.

It turns out that, without realizing it, I’ve become a renegade blogger. It happened on Monday when I wrote a post in my blog about why an organization called H-Net (a cluster of scholarly networks organized around a particular theme–German history, Intellectual history, etc.) is in trouble because their content delivery model is based on the email listserv. According to their Vice President for Networks, there are about 100,000 subscribers (total) to their various lists, who receive, on average, 10-15 email messages per month from each listserv they subscribe to.

My argument, if you read my first post and the ones that followed argued that email is the communication tool of the past decade, and that blogs, wikis, and other social networking platforms, are the content delivery tools of the future. So, I said that if H-Net wanted to stay relevant for scholars (especially in a decade when people like you will be the new scholars), it needed to start moving away from email and toward these new tools.

This proposal got a lot of people’s knickers in a knot. Unlike much of what I post in my blog, this thread has generated a lot of discussion, both on my blog (25 comments thus far) and in other blogs (and on internal H-Net lists…that I am not able to read since they keep their internal lists private).

I point you to this, not because I am proud to be a renegade blogger (although I am), but to point you to ways that communication among scholars around issues they care about are changing.