Welcome:
To all of you who came to our presentation in Cincinnati, thank you so much for making our experience so enjoyable at the Ohio First Year Summit. We had a blast and we hope that you had a good time as well.
Below is the abstract for our presentation. On the "Downloads" page, you will find the electronic copies of all the documents we used during our presentation.
If any of the links don't work or you have any questions about these file, please feel free to contact us. Our contact information can be found at the bottom of the page.
~Val and Bob
Abstract:
We piloted a new session during the 2009 summer pre-orientation at Muskingum University in which we addressed ongoing issues surrounding social networking sites. We had seen a trend of increasingly irresponsible use of social networking sites with a correlating increase of the “private domain” defense of the irresponsible user. This was especially relevant after first year housing assignment were received by students who wanted to change roommates after seeing their new roommates social networking profile. Incoming students’ profiles show just a snapshot of their life instead of a holistic picture of that student. Students were publicly flaunting socially unacceptable and illegal behaviors on their profiles. When these behaviors were addressed with the students, they would not understand the legal and campus judicial implications that their profiles contained. We decided to attempt to reach each first year student in the incoming class. We found that approximately 90% of first year students at Muskingum go through the pre-orientation program.
As a result of these concerns, we created a 45 minute, interactive and educational program for a group of 35-45 students. Our learning objectives for this session were: for the students to get to know each other, to become aware of the risks of using social networking sites, to have a new perspective when looking at their sites and those of their peers, and to be more responsible as individuals for what they post on their sites. In order to achieve these objectives, student first split into four groups and introduced themselves by creating a partially completed social networking profile. This profile required students to share select information about them in order to create an imaginary person who was based on students’ collective interests. Students then had to choose from preselected groups and pictures (edited to protect actual identities of the persons in the pictures) that would represent the created character. Upon completing their profile, groups then chose preselected “bumper stickers” to attach to other groups characters’ profiles. To transition students into being more objective about their created profiles, everyone watched a satirical video clip from youtube.com about what facebook.com actions would be like in real life. A group discussion about identity safety, legal and campus judicial ramifications, and perception as reality in regards to their created profiles followed the video. Student were asked to reexamine their profiles and specifically reflect on the topics were discussed and adapt their profiles in a more contentious frame.
Our goal is to present this program to session participants for 45 minutes and use the remaining 15 minutes for questions and discussion of the session. By having the participants experience the program in the same manner in which it was presented to the students, the participants will know first-hand the technique in which to present the information to students back at their respective institutions. We feel that this topic has very little published education geared towards students despite the fact that it is a crucial topic for the students to understand.