A vision of students today
This seems to be all over the net today. Pretty thought provoking…
The video is actually kind of prevalent in a number of ways. For instance, the mention of Facebook is pretty interesting to me. At the beginning of the summer, when we were interviewing for our Terry project hires, we were fortunate enough to garner many outstanding applications, and also had the opportunity to interview many great students. One of the questions we asked was “What’s a good way to get the word out to students when such and such was happening with regards to the Terry project – be it a speaker, or the website, or an event, etc?”
Time and time again, the most ubiquitous answer was: “to use Facebook.” After a couple such answers, it was here that I would turn to Allen and kind of go, “What the hell is Facebook?”
Anyway, as a result of that experience, I signed up myself, and even started a group based on a silly science-literacy project I have with the Science Creative Quarterly. I was kind of interested to know what (if any) advantage one may have, if one was fortunate enough to have an administrative role in a group with a large audience.
Admittedly, so far, it doesn’t seem that impressive. True, Facebook seems pretty powerful as a networking tool, but only when that network happens to be your close circle of friends. In terms of utility for mobilizing large numbers of individuals, I’m not so sure it’s that useful in that department (i.e. you can send a note to 1000 group members, but the feedback is ultimately still pretty minimal except for your immediate network of friends).
Or maybe, I just have to give it some time. Anyway, some interesting things to think about.
