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We had a very successful live webinar panel on “Facebook and Orientation” yesterday afternoon. We maxed out the available slots with almost 50 schools in attendance.

Thank you again to our wonderful panelists:

Debra Sanborn, Iowa State University (find her on twitter: @debrasanborn)

Dr. Jennifer Sherry, VCU School of Education

Beth Oakley, University of Windsor

This webinar was intended as an experiment in live, distance, collaborative learning for student affairs. The feedback from the participants and the panelists was enthusiastic. We’ll definitely be doing more.

Unfortunately, however, we learned (the hard way) one limitation of our webinar software: it does not record the conference call on the VoIP bridge.

This means that I won’t be able to post the recording of the webinar as I had hoped. My apologies to everyone for this. We will figure out a work around next time to make sure that the information is captured and shared.

I can, however, share some interesting tidbits from the seminar, and Debra will be doing her own recap shortly.

We ran a quick poll of the attendees on the wiki page for the seminar, and here were the results (26 respondents):

1. Do you have a personal Facebook account?

Yep 96.00%
Nope 4.00%

2. Did you officially start your class of 2013 Facebook group?

No 88.46%
Not Sure 7.69%
Yes 3.85%

3. If you didn’t start your 2013 Facebook group, are you in contact with the person who did?

No 64.00%
Yes 16.00%
Not Sure 16.00%
I started the group 4.00%

4. Would you accept a Facebook friend request from a student?

Yep 50.00%
Undecided 26.92%
Nope 23.08%

So, if you haven’t yet, reach out to your 2013 group leaders!

As always, there was some discussion about appropriateness of friending students and the challenges of blending the social and academic context. I’m looking forward to continuing the conversation around these topics.

Here are few follow up resources:

Dr. Sherry participated in a podcast on using Facebook in education. It’s available here.

Faculty on Facebook: Confirm or Deny? available here.

The main Facebook page of VCU school of education is here.

Here are my slides from the APCA National Conference. The first half is Orientation and Facebook, the second half is an overview of the Red Rover pilot program of last fall. (I did not present during the webinar.)

More resources are coming in now. I’ll post them up here as I receive them.