In September of 2006, whilst lecturing at a British university, where I was also completing my doctoral degree, a colleague invited me to engage an “experiment” with a new social media platform called, “Facebook”.
I joined, and around the beginning of Oct. 2006, I invited my students to join me there, as an alternative forum for connecting outside the lecture hall, and a couple times, as an experimental ‘virtual lecture hall’.
Our plan was to meet in a multistory Starbucks cafe, near our downtown urban campus, and to communicate only by sending posts via FB. It was brave, it was chaotic, it was frazzled, but we did it! This was exhilarating!
Our next project was to see if we could increase student attendance on our annual London shopping trip by promoting in via FB — we had 3 busloads, hundreds of students attended!
Dottore Mark 