Poking and tweeting just turned academic.

Networking sites are becoming an essential tool for the tech-savvy professor or administrator on campuses across the nation. Washington University is no exception.

More and more staff and faculty members are using Twitter, Facebook and blogging sites to communicate with students and with each other. Departments like the Office of Residential Life have more than 200 followers on Twitter, while the University’s own Facebook page has amassed 4,753 fans.

This year, the 11 campus libraries have started using Twitter to broadcast information to the student body. The University Libraries’ page already has 100 followers on Twitter.

“Twitter has become widely used within universities and colleges, and we just thought it would be an interesting way to promote our services in a different medium,” said Makiba J. Foster, a reference librarian for American and African American studies.

The Twitter page was designed primarily to provide updated information about the various services offered by the libraries, such as printing and the arrival of new collections.

“We have some alums who are following us,” Foster said. “We just finished a promotion where we asked trivia questions and the first person to reply got a nice prize—a book plate. That was a nice way to recognize our followers and promote our services.”

Some professors are encouraging their students to use Facebook as a classroom tool. Students in Assistant Professor of Marketing Selin Malkoc’s market research course have been asked to join the course’s Facebook group.

Malkoc said the purpose behind using Facebook as a tool is twofold: For one, it provides students a practical application in market research in the community. Students can also post and share findings that relate to the course material on the discussion board.

“I have had a lot of past students who already have jobs in this industry, and they want to be able to share with the new students,” Malkoc said. “The current students want to always ask questions, with the older ones serving as learning tools.”

Malkoc also tried Blackboard, an e-learning software that the University had used for several years in an effort to generate online discussion forums. Blackboard, however, proved inconvenient for students who wished to contribute to discussions at their leisure.

“The idea is to get people to think about the implications of what we talk about in class with their lives and to discuss this with the most ease—that’s why I went back to thinking about having a Facebook group,” Malkoc said. “I know that they go there regularly, and I do too.”

So far, around 80 percent of the class has joined the Facebook group.

These communication venues still remain a relatively new tool for college professors and administrators, whereas most students have been using them since before entering college.

Aside from using Facebook in the traditional sense, many students are using the social networking site to promote the student groups they’re involved in.

“We use Facebook to try to get it out there, but we also use it for communication for our own members,” junior Stephen Bailey said of his group.

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Tags: Facebook, Twitter

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 2009 at 2:04 am and is filed under Academics, Administration, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through this feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.