Wednesday June 06, 2007 Facebook Docs
Recently there seems to be a flurry of activity surrounding the development and downloading of applications for use in Facebook. The most recent that I've seen is Facebook Docs by "Scribd," which is described as:Facebook Docs is a library of schoolwork where anyone can contribute. Over 50,000 documents have been uploaded, including problems sets, poetry, lecture notes, and random funny stuff. Every year, millions of college papers are produced, and virtually all of them are just gathering dust on people's hard drives. Too bad, because a lot of that is good stuff that other people would find useful. The point of Scribd is not to encourage plagiarism, but rather to help unlock the information on people's computers by making it easy for people to share their creations.
Within the Facebook community there's some discussion and reviews of the application (to see it you'll need to log into Facebook and then search for Docs). The discussion/reviews range from its functionality to debates over whether " If you get caught for uploading a textbook, you will probably get expelled from school." Interestingly, there are also a couple of Facebook users who have started discussions on research topics.
Facebook didn't create this application but is obviously hosting it. Currently, there are more than 11,700 users.
I'll be curious to watch what happens to this application. Over at the Ubiquitous Librarian blog, Brian Mathews at Georgia Tech shares some ideas about how this application might work as a Institutional Repository.
Posted by klducket ( Jun 06 2007, 05:01:41 PM EDT ) Permalink Comments [3]Post a Comment:
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It definitely has some up AND down sides. The idea of sharing the knowledge and a kind of communal learning is really good. Reading what others have to say about particular subjects can spark new ideas and questions into the minds of readers and everyone could gain a broader vision of a topic.
On the other hand, plagiarism is a real possibility. File sharing services people run on their computers (Lime Wire, Morpheus, etc.) COULD be used to share all of their knowledge and perspective with others by sharing all of the "course docs". File sharing services could also be used to share people's favorite chocolate chip cookie recipes. In reality those services are used quite extensively for illegally distributing copyrighted material. In a similar fashion, Scribd could be used for merely copying and pasting large portions of papers without requiring any serious reflection.
As an aside, I think our whole notion of plagiarism needs to be reexamined in light of newer learning theories which stress communal ways of knowing and learning. (I think I've just found my topic for our article discussion.)
Posted by Greg Kraus on June 08, 2007 at 09:23 AM EDT #
I haven't spent too much at Facebook lately. I have to admit to being less excited about it as a tool since (a) it started getting more attention among professionals, prospective employers, etc., thereby becoming less fun and casual, and (b) I got a little spooked by the connections between Facebook and the CIA and "Total Information Awareness" and all that.
"It appears at first glance that DoD, along with the CIA, has managed to circumvent its previous Congressionally established limitations and find corporate sponsorship for its programs, under the thin veil of a useful social network for unwitting college students. And those college students continue to log on to The Facebook, completely unaware of the massive affronts to their privacy." (see http://www.commongroundcommonsense.org/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t34949.html)
brief Flash movie:
http://albumoftheday.com/facebook/
Posted by swatkins on June 12, 2007 at 11:22 AM EDT #
I'm just reading this now--sorry for the late comment.
Greg, I think we have to differentiate between tools that enable illegal or unethical activity and the illegal activities themselves. Plagiarizing is easy no matter the application on Facebook. The cliched metaphor running through my head is that we shouldn't throw out the baby with the bath water. Or something like that.
Posted by Joan on June 27, 2007 at 09:35 AM EDT #