There! I did it! I signed up for Facebook...

I signed up for Facebook yesterday and spent a little time setting my privacy settings as high as they would go, ie. everything only visible to "Friends". I can always go back and change them if I need to. Before I signed up, I checked out the information that Facebook had regarding privacy settings and I also checked out a couple of blogs that gave good tutorials. While I was surfing around, I read that quite a few people wrote that as soon as they figured out how to set their privacy settings, Facebook would go and change the set-up. This sometimes required these people to go back in and make changes to their privacy settings when Facebook revamped things. I noticed that the interface looked different than the ones described in the blog postings from only six months ago (I could not find any more recent ones on this topic), but I was still able to figure it out after clicking here and there. That is literally what I needed to do, because it wasn't organized in a way that I thought made sense. For instance, making customized lists of friends was described in the above posting, but seems to have changed significantly since then, as noted in this blog post. I was not able to choose a couple of lists of friends that would see my posts. I could only choose one customized list, OR, "Friends", OR "Friends of Friends", OR "Public". I will need to experiment more with this.

Even as I was going through the motions of signing up, I was hesitant to do so... wondering where my personal information would be shared. However, I'm getting over it  for the following reasons:

1. I can put as little information in my profile and posts as a I like.
2. I already have much of this information out there in blogs that I have created.
3. I set my privacy settings so that only my "Friends" can see what I post and so that only my "Friends" can search for me. This one I may have to rethink, because why would my current "Friends" need to search for me. Perhaps I need to change this to "Friends of Friends".
4. I was actually interested in how the whole Facebook set-up worked and I feel much more comfortable teaching about Social Networking, Digital Citizenship and Online Presence to my students when I am actually experimenting with it.
5. I found some good friends from France on Facebook and have sent out my "Friend Requests".
6. I had a "Friend Request" from 2006 (!) that popped up in my new account. This good friend sent it to me via email 6 years ago and it was waiting in the system for when I joined! Crazy!

Stay tuned for further observations as I experiment more with Facebook for personal use and investigate its use in the classroom. I am reading this article right now on The Edublogger:

The Why and How of Using Facebook For Educators – No Need to be Friends At All!

Melisa