David Woodbridge

November 13, 2007

Students are wary of attempts by universities to engage with them on social networking websites such as Facebook, according to a new study.

Research conducted by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has concluded that students are uncomfortable with lecturers and other academic staff extending the classroom in this way. Lawrie Phipps, the JISC project manager, said, “students really do want to keep their lives separate. They don't want to be always available to their lecturers or bombarded with academic information.”

This view is consistent with those of many students at the LSE and elsewhere. One first-year anthropologist claimed the activity seems “strange” and expressed concern at the blurring of the lines between the academic and social lives of students. “It's as though they're forcing their way into our personal spaces,” he said. 

A student at Sussex University wryly commented that “we can’t talk about any misgivings with our lecturers in a secure environment if they’re there too”. On the other hand, some see this move as simply the next logical step in the increasing proliferation of the use of technology in teaching, and not necessarily an undesirable one.

One of the highest rated undergraduate courses in terms of student satisfaction is EH101, of which a large proportion of the course materials such as videoed lectures are already on WebCT. One first-year Economic History student said that it would be “interesting to see how academic staff utilized such methods of teaching. Most young people today are comfortable using new technology and sites such as Facebook. I certainly don’t see it as a bad thing”.

Facebook is the most popular social networking website amongst university students, with some seven million active users in the UK alone. MySpace has a larger overall userbase but is arguably less popular amongst university students. There have already been concerns raised about invasions of privacy by academic staff into students’ social networking websites, an area many students previously perceived as sacrosanct.

Students at Oxford University were recently involved in “poor conduct” during after-exam celebrations were identified by university authorities using photographs on Facebook, leading many to believe that the intrusion of universities into social networking is an inevitability.