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48 coNTINuED THE NET gENERATIoN oN cAMpuS AND oNLINE • First-year students found Facebook more useful for making new friends than did upperclass students. Based on the preliminary results, Ly speculates that the major contributions of residence-based Facebook groups include • facilitating the transition to the new residence (in particular for first-year students, answering questions and making them feel more comfortable) • building community through media-sharing (photos and videos of dorm and campus events that residents attended together) • supplementing face-to-face interactions by sharing personal information during the formation of friendships • and increasing involvement, investment, and connection with the weak-tie network in the residence. The major detractions, cited by a minority of students, were the distraction, time-wasting, or addictiveness of using Facebook (though they continued to use it heavily), the potential to form preconceived notions about people from information and photos posted, and the potential to diminish faceto-face interactions (e.g., choosing to write on someone’s virtual wall instead of walking down the hall). Web 2.0. The latter have been called event blogging, lifeblogging, or lifecasting. These emerging technologies promise to further impact campus life, when, for example, both course lectures and student parties can be streamed live on the Web by almost anyone. Ironically, associated with all these trends is also a massive movement of students off campus in terms of their technology use. Whereas in the 1980s and 1990s, colleges and universities provided the vast majority of student information devices, software, and services, in the 2000s students increasingly use their own devices and off-campus commercial services like Google and Facebook. Among the resulting new dilemmas for student affairs professionals is how to handle behavior issues that arise on nonuniversity hosted services: for example, a dispute between hallmates that occurs virtually off campus in Facebook or Second Life or offensive comments posted anonymously in college gossip sites. Administrators must now juggle their own acceptable-use policies and other campus policies (that may or may not apply) with commercial services’ terms of use, free speech, and common sense. We are clearly on shifting ground here, sometimes working together with students to create new norms for unprecedented social situations. ways that were simply not possible before. To take advantage of these tools, student affairs and residence life professionals should be proactive, not merely reactive. They should plan together – in staff training, workshops, and retreats – how to use studentowned devices, residence Web sites, multimedia production, electronic discussion, social networking, and immersive environments to serve their goals. Both professional and student staff should also anticipate problems and how to handle them. It is nearly certain that “stuff will happen” online, so we should not be surprised when someone overreacts, posts inappropriate material, makes offensive comments, or worse. “Students may do stupid things on the Facebook,” Fred Stutzman reminds us in his article “How University Administrators Should Approach Facebook: Ten Rules.” They will do stupid things in the virtual dorm lounge just as for generations they have done stupid things in the real-life dorm lounge. Most have not been expelled for their real-space lapses, but rather have been given the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Interpersonal or social slipups in virtual space, as in real space, can be turned into teachable moments. While we learn to negotiate these new terrains, residential staff should exercise caution about intervening or overreacting, possibly robbing students of the chance to construct effective learning communities together. ts Residential Students Moving Off Campus Mobile social networking (like Twitter, which broadcasts short updates to networks of friends on cell phones) and the use of mobile streaming media are examples of trends that combine online content, mobility, convergence, prosumer tools, and Being Proactive with Virtual Tools The new interactive technologies that most Net Gen students are familiar with before they come to campus can indeed complement and enhance traditional community-building tools in the residences. Moreover, these new tools allow us to encourage student learning and development in Richard Holeton is associate director of academic computing and head of student computing at Stanford University. 5 Talking STick
Talking Stick - March/April 2009

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