Facebook enables the account holder to make comments or announcements, show pictures, and leave comments on other people's posts or pictures. I have heard that people "break up" relationships by taking a statement off of their Facebook pages, i.e. "Relationship Status: Single" where it said, "In a relationship with ****" before. I think people actually know their relationship is over by this method. Facebook also spawns games, a very popular one being "Farmville". I was invited repeatedly (to the point of insanity) to get acreage, plants crops, accept virtual baskets of produce and adopt virtual stray pets and so on. Realizing this was a massive time-sink for many people, I chose not to even go looking into what it was.
I watched a new young male teacher get fired from his first teaching job, because his middle school students found his Facebook account. He either accepted them as "friends" so they could see everything on his Facebook account or his account was just open to the public. The students found, and talked about, pictures he had posted from the year before that showed him at parties - drinking alcohol and whatnot. That demonstrates a major "con" about Facebook - you have to pick one audience and only post things acceptable for that audience. You can't post pictures of your kinky social life to impress your friends and ex-significant other and think that your parents, your employer, and your studetns won't see it also.
A previous co-worker of mine is now a librarian at an American school in Kuala Lampur. Before this gig, she and her family had moved to China. I can lose hours looking at the fantastic pictures she posts - wading in water with elephants, climbing spectacular Asian mountains, even seeing plates of food prepared by the "nanny" she had complimentary her first year in China. I soon began to notice that all of her pictures had a similar theme....just how happy she is. Every picture was fantastic. Every picture showed her grinning from ear to ear. Every caption exlaimed, "So Happy!!" I also noticed that her husband was suspiciously absent from the pictures after a certain time so I wrote to her and found out that he was still in China living with his Chinese girlfriend. So why the happy, happy pictures? Is she trying to prove something to him? To herself? Is it just her personality to only show the world the upside of her life?
Pictures are huge in Facebook. I was invited to a Christmas party by the parents of a student and as the parent had worked at the school and was a previous co-worker and many students (my library assistants) were there, I felt obligated to go. During the course of the evening, I noticed that the students were constantly taking pictures - of themselves - with their cell phones. They were almost so busy with the pictures that they wanted to post to prove how much fun they were having, that they weren't really participating in a party at all. They had perfected the art of holding their cell phones out at arm's length, posing without shame that people looked on, and snapping pictures of themselves "in the action."
To be honest, maybe it is this aspect of Facebook that leaves me an outsider to it all. I am not photogenic and I have always hated pictures of myself. Where does that leave me in a Facebook world? I can take pictures of many other things and post them, but not having an ever-changing profile picture for my "friends" to view and possibly poke fun at is a stigma of sorts. (And I know about the "poking fun" - how many pictures of friends and relatives on Facebook have I discussed with other people...."Did you even SEE the picture she put on there???" But you don't have to abstain from posting pictures of yourself to be free of the picture posting problem....other people are taking pictures of you and they are posting them on Facebook. And they can tag the picture with your name and the picture will show up on your account whether you like it or not. Sure, you can untag it, but how many people will have seen it and saved it or printed it in the meantime?
By the way, I remember that I went to a bachelorette party when I was in my 20's. The events that happened there should be buried deep in history, but I found out later ...from my sister who heard from her friend who had a friend that attended the party, that there were some hair-raising pictures of this sedate, responsible librarian in existence. I realized then that I would probably never want to chance going into politics, but now, thanks to Facebook, these pictures could be scanned in and tagged...I can just see the captions: "Miss Tapp is WILD!" ...I am not going to get more specific than that except to say that I learned the consequences of "jello shooters" mixed with ....certain performers. And I have no clue who has these pictures or if more than one person was taking pictures that night. And these powder kegs could explode under me any minute.
The young people of today are so busy trying to create just such pictures to post that they don't realize how it could affect them later when they want to pretend they didn't do that sort of thing. And, truthfully, you don't have to really do that sort of thing to get sucker-punched by Facebook. I was looking at a "student friend's" facebook pictures of the prom and saw a picture of a very nice high school girl dancing. She'd been caught with a strange look on her face and the caption read, "Anna's O face." The student in the picture wrote a comment saying how embarrassing it was and that they should take the pictures off....but the school community had already seen it and there would be no forgetting it. I hope her parents didn't peruse her Facebook account and see that. For her sake or theirs, I'm not sure.
The last Facebook "con" I will discuss is the feature(s) that posts your likes and dislikes and activities to your account for all of your "friends" to see. (I'm assuming the account is only shared with "friends".) If you aren't diligent, many of the sites you look at will zing over to your Facebook account and post for you that you were looking at that site. I gave my sister my Facebook password so that she could look at people's accounts without making one of her own. (Is this "stalking"?) When I would log in to Facebook, I started seeing some seriously troubling things....that I had watched a video of two high school girls in a fist fight for one. I called my sister and asked what the heck that was about. Apparently, this video showed up on her someone else's account and she clicked on it to watch it to see what he had been looking at. And it showed up on my account as "CARLA TAPP WATCHED THIS VIDEO." I was working in a high school at the time.....what possible spin could you put on that under the circumstances?? I was horrified and immediately changed my password. My sister had to make her own account to continue her Facebook shenanigans. Eventually, she and I started speaking again.
Although the potential horrors of Facebook weigh heavily on me, I enjoyed looking at the school library Facebook pages in this weeks Modules folder. In addition to my "personal Facebook page", I also had a Facebook page for my high school library. I didn't with the elementary library because I didn't think the students were doing Facebook, especially the much younger grades. It may have been a way to get information to parents, though. That is the biggest advantage to having a Facebook page for your library or organization or club - you have an instantaneous large audience who will most likely at least glance at your posts. And this audience (students AND adults) will be on their Facebook accounts for hours a day.
The Facebook page for the Unquiet Library had links to book trailers and posts about articles and videos about historical events, library related trivia, and their school related information (like the untimely death of a previous student). The librarian was able to showcase her bulletin board designs and show many pictures of what a busy and beautiful place her library is. Her page had 738 "likes", so I'm assuming these are all people who will see posts that she makes to the account. She has used Facebook to promote her library and to advertise special events. I think that many of the articles to historical facts and events could be curriculum related. If the Librarian colloborates with a teacher, they could post interesting, relevant links on the Facebook page for the students and the teacher to see.
The New Providence Elementary Library Facebook page was used in a similar manner. I looked at the photos to make sure that the "never post a child's face" rule was being adhered to...and it was. Most of the pictures were book covers and I noticed a picture of the book fair sign to advertise the book fair and pictures of adults, like teachers or an author visit. I especially liked the post about viewing Harry Potter's world on Google Maps. I didn't know about that. This Facebook page also had entries with hash tags, such as 7/5 #bookaday #summerreading #summerthrowdown . I tried clicking on one but I'm not sure what this is about. Are these Twitter related?
I couldn't open the Wagenheim Middle School Library Facebook page...but while I was looking for middle school Facebook pages, I saw that there is a page for James Patterson's book, Middle School: the worst years of my life. This page has 7,264 likes and tons of comments. I can't seem to figure out who is the administrator of the site, though. This is a good use of Facebook for library purposes. In fact, it would be a good instructional use of Facebook to create a page for a particular assignment or project. It is easy to comment on posts and updates to the assignment could be added by the teacher and the librarian. (The librarian could add information about relevant research tools and post links to sites like easybib.com or knightcite.)
The Luna Middle School library in San Antonio, TX has a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Luna-Middle-School-Library/106593609433213 . There are lots of video book trailers embedded in the posts. This, along with pictures and comments from other school members who have read a book, would be a very effective tool to promote reading. Promoting or "book talking" books required in curriculum class would both promote reading and be supporting the curriculum.
I can see the value of Facebook pages to promote your school library. Some of the other social media outlets, like having a blog or webpage, might seem on the surface to have better ways to promote the school's curriculum and collaborate with teachers, but Facebook has those capabilities if you look beyond the social features. As I said before, a page for a particular project can be created easily and with Facebook you know you will have access to a huge audience - way more than you can expect to follow your blog or check out your website and all of its links.
This is really long -- sorry!
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