Monday, August 31, 2009

facebook assignment

facebook assignment for digital media production

1. design a new or redesign an already existing facebook group. you may belong to the group but the group may not be about you.

2. when designing and creating your facebook group, seek and receive feedback from other people. consider talking to people who you think would join such a group; consider talking to the skeptics. seek and speak with more than a few people but not too many. above all, listen to what they say.

3. after carefully considering your feedback and paying special attention to the elements of social network sites discussed in Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship, create your facebook group.

4. once you have created your facebook group, design an outreach strategy that results in people (or "fans") joining your group. your goal with respect to fans may be size, niche, geographic diversity, or anything else - but you must have a goal and you must design an outreach strategy to meet that goal.

5. in no more than a one-page single-spaced essay, explain your facebook group, your goal, your outreach strategy, and the outcomes.

rules: a) on tuesday, september 8, be prepared to demo your work. if you have no work to demo, do not come to class; and b) your one page paper is due in class on thursday, september 10. no late work accepted.

hints: a) you are allowed to create a gag/joke group but i highly advise against it. instead, you should work on/with a group that actually means something to you; and b) the most important element of this project is learning to listen to other people.

4 comments:

Melanie said...

Wow! what a cool assignment. Very nice. Thanks for posting and sharing it with others. My only change to this would be to direct the student's group to a specifically public sphere goal (as opposed to some topic of interest - entertainment figures, etc). This generation needs to learn more about the larger social purposes that social media can serve as well as expanding their sense of their role in society beyond consuming culture. Are you in Twitter?

Melanie said...

D'oh! Just noticed. "Follow me on Twitter" right hand sidebar ... :)

david silver said...

Hello Melanie,

thanks for the comment and suggestion.

as for adding a public sphere goal, that comes later in the semester - it's only week 2 here at USF! my goal with this assignment is to get all students up and running, making and sharing media. this is easy with facebook since all of them are already on it.

but later in the semester, once we've discussed deeper and more diverse ideas of digital production, we'll get to some assignments that i think you'll like. =)

as you've found, i tweet at @davidmsilver. thanks again for the comment.

Jared said...

First step after thinking of a group, is praying that it does not already exist.