Great expectations (lead to abandoned blog posts)

There was a  JISC announcement today regarding new research which suggests that:

students are starting to mix their social networking sites with their academic studies, and inviting tutors and lecturers into their virtual space.

Earlier this week, I highlighted something similar (albeit it with postgraduates), as students were encouraged to create a Facebook profile and use it within their MSc course. Back in March, I mentioned that Facebook had belatedly given users control among specifying how much information could be shared with each friend, as users were able to group friends – personal and work, in my case – and control privacy settings for each one. This ability to control separate groups offers students the chance to interact with fellow students and lecturers while keeping their personal, off-campus life separate.

Andy Powell’s post popped up in my feed reader while I was writing this so I’ve abandoned summarising the rest of the release and would advise heading there for Andy’s summary. The full release and accompanying report are on the JISC site.

Facebook: Saving Private Ryan (or Neil, or anybody else for that matter…)

I was interested to see this week that Facebook finally allowed tighter control over which users get to see your online information, thus allowing you to be a bit more private and in control of your data. A couple of weeks ago, I was moaning to Phil about the need to create separate profiles – one for personal, another for work – to maintain a distinction over what would be relevant for other Facebook users to see. It is now possible to place your friends into one or more groups, and then specifying which friend(s)/group(s) have permission to access certain parts of your profile, e.g., photos.

This has two obvious benefits: firstly, it goes some way towards keeping the personal part of the site separate from colleagues; secondly, it stops my friends hearing about the next CETIS SIG meeting and badgering me about what metadata is. As far as I can tell, Facebook friends can be placed into more than one group, so friends who are also colleagues could be treated as both. Nice to see a little more control – on this site, at least – over your online social identity.

With it currently being possible to specify relationships such as travel buddies, colleagues, etc., it would be nice for Facebook – or an application – to convert this Facebook-only data into something like XFN, so that it can be used in a meaningful and more open way.While it’s nice to see a timeline of who you shared a flat with and who you went drinking in Benidorm with, it would be useful to keep a maintained list of co-workers, colleagues you have met and others you haven’t, etc.