This Would Be Easier If You Were Joking
I'll admit it at the outset: I'm in a bad mood today.
But when I see things like this, and this, and this, all talking about running courses in Facebook, I can't help myself
(Okay, really I can. But in this case, I don't want to).
Read Facebook's terms of service.
The "User Content Posted on the Site" section is particularly relevant here:
When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.
While IANAL, these seems to render the site completely useless for aspiring writers looking for feedback, as even a private draft shared among friends is licensed to Facebook.
So, if you want to give away the rights to your intellectual property, post it on Facebook. I'm not even going to get into the other significant issues, although they should not be overlooked.
Granted, the traditional LMS is a monolith designed to serve the needs of institutions first, teachers second, and students a very distant third. And yes, a social learning space is a vast improvement. But, a space needs to offer more than just the potential for social learning for it to be a wise choice. Facebook offers some generic functionality that is an improvement over traditional LMS's, but this says more about the sorry state of existing LMS solutions than about the suitability of Facebook as a replacement.
If you want a social learning space, you have a bevy of open source solutions that get the job done more effectively and allow users to retain control of their content and their user data. Moodle, Drupal, or even WPMU are a better place to start.
Have to agree with you on this...
Have to agree with you on this. Can't believe I'm saying this given our on-going discussions. It's nice to finally shave an issue we can come together on. In fact, Facebook as an LMS is probably one of the more dangerous ideas I have heard recently. Not only for the points about licensing that you make above, which are extremely important. But also because this space is primarily a social space for students that is often associated more with relationships and gatherings than a specific space for their academic work. To try and make it could potentially spoil any value this tool may have had. Moreover, the tool itself is less than aesthetically pleasing and with the open API, it is all over the map in a very bad way.
Facebook does the social networking elements well, and has without questions become the standard for millions of users. But if we start trying to populate courses through this space, I'm not sure those who enjoy the relative separation from their classes will really engage the idea of conflating the two. I believe you would have some major resistance on the part of both students and the faculty -and with good reason.
Additionally, students should be able to create numerous spaces for the different facets of their life, not one stop shopping for everything from the weekend's outing to the Art History research paper. The two may be related, mind you, but the tool should afford the student the ability to frame that narrative(s) --both aesthetically and formally--rather than depending on one, monolithic space to tell the multi-faceted parts of any one person's personal, social, and academic life. Facebook as an LMS is a terrible idea in my opinion, and the more I use Facebook and the more their API opens up - the more I begin to think Facebook itself is a tool that is trying to do far more than its good at, potentially making the end of its appeal nigh. Though, I could be very wrong on this point, and I am quite biased towards the blog, but the blog is a tool that reflects to me a more interesting set of relationships where people don't necessarily have to pretend they have 250 friends. The strengths of Facebook (make all these connections simple and highly visible -such as your 250 friends), are also it's greatest weakness for it creates an illusory profile of a person, a community, and their network. How can you really engage a person with 250 friends? And why would you want to? The whole network has had its appeal to me at times, but in the end I could take or leave it for anything related to teaching and learning. That's it, I said it.
What about the public domain?
The most interesting clause to me is "...and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant...". No one has the right to grant such a license if quoting works in the public domain, so does that mean, for example, that one cannot quote Shakespeare on Facebook? Similarly, what about quoting someone else's material within the scope of fair use, or material that's been CC licensed?
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