Thursday 8 March 2012

The Living Facebook Project

Starting next Monday, my digital literacy students will be living facebook.
"Wait...WHAT!" - Actual response from student
For five whole days, they will not be logging into the preeminent social network and instead, living out their daily interactions on Facebook in real life. 

I discovered this project a few weeks ago when I was perusing twitter and happened upon an exchange between Dean Shareski and John Spencer. The link that followed took me to the “Living Facebook Blog: 40 Days of Doing Facebook in Person”. What I discovered was one man’s epic journey of 40 days without Facebook. Everything Mr. Spencer did on Facebook he would now be engaging with in real life. The goal was to compare his experience off line and on Facebook. A simple, yet effective look at what it’s like to remove oneself from a place we travel on a daily basis. 

Today, John Spencer will be speaking to my students virtually and discussing his experience with living Facebook. I will also be engaging in this project with my students and blogging about the experience. My students will all be writing reflection posts each day on their experience and highlighting certain aspects of what they did differently. Also, we will have a a daily Twitter chat discussing this project in class and students will be creating video reflections at the end of the project to detail their experience. 

My hope for this project is that students will understand that Facebook is simply another space for socializing, connecting, and sharing and not a departure from reality. I want them to start seeing Facebook as a platform that they can use to not only socialize but highlight and empower their voice and talents. You can follow this project through this blog, our Digital Literacy class blog and also on Twitter through the hashtags #dlit3 and #dlit4

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