Facebook has been a staple at four-year colleges across the country for the past couple of years, but its arrival at community colleges has been more recent, as the site has expanded from its Ivy League roots to become a bona fide cultural monolith. So while officials at Harvard or Penn State may feel as if they have contemplated Facebook from every possible angle, institutions like Johnson County Community College, in Kansas, are still getting a read on it.
"Facebook really does own our campuses, and a lot of people don’t realize it," said Kit Gorrell Frankenfield, a technology specialist and adjunct professor of English at the college, in a presentation on Facebook at the League for Innovation in the Community College’s Conference on Information Technology. Ms. Frankenfield, herself a Facebook user, led campus officials on a tour of the site, which many audience members had never seen up close.
Ms. Frankenfield started her tour with a quick disclaimer, warning viewers that they might encounter some salacious or offensive material on profiles that "were not written for you as an adult audience." In fact, save for a bit of cursing, most of the pages she browsed were pretty tame.
But those profiles gave the audience a lesson in how students use — or, more appropriately, how they don’t use — Facebook’s privacy features. As she scrolled through a list of Johnson County students who identified themselves as fans of the TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway, Ms. Frankenfield noted that only one of ten had blocked her profile from being viewed by strangers. When Ms. Frankenfield opened the Facebook page of a student who had posted his cellphone number and address for all to see, there were audible gasps from campus officials.
Several of those officials shared stories of high-school counselors and prospective employers who had taken to scanning Facebook and MySpace for the barest hints of student impropriety. But Ms. Frankenfield urged against taking students’ profiles at face value: Rare is the Facebook page, she said, that doesn’t exaggerate its creator’s collegiate exploits. –Brock Read
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