Facebook: Helpful or harmful?

With an estimated 750 million users as of July 2011, Facebook accounts have become quite common among most high school students.

And while the site often leads to time-wasting, it also has many features that help education.
History teacher Jeffrey Scott has his classes use the site’s group feature.

“It’s a place that they could ask questions about things that were unclear and it’s also a way for them to study as a group without actually being in the same room,” Scott said.

Sophomore world history student Brian Lyu feels that the group is indeed the online equivalent of the classroom that Scott wants it to be.

However, Lyu believes that turning to the group for help is not always ideal.

“People don’t work as hard if they study together because they just get the answer from other people and nothing else,” Lyu said.

In addition to teachers, seniors Megan Kao and Peter Hsieh have found a variety of benefits from using a Dance Club group on Facebook.

“Dance Club mostly revolves around dancers who dance almost every day,” Kao said. “Facebook is really convenient for us to share videos, new master classes or anything that we think that other members might find exciting with each other.”

Kao also recognizes Facebook’s online publicity as plus toward spreading club awareness. The openness of the site allows not only club members but also public Facebook friends to see the links shared in the group.

At the same time, the lack of public restrictions on the site have caused problems for the club in the past.

“The openness is one of the bigger loopholes,” Kao said. “Everyone on Facebook can see a member’s posts, and a while ago we had an issue of regarding—for lack of better words—’flame wars.’”

According to Kao, Facebook automatically sets a newly created group’s privacy settings to “public.” As a result, the club had to manually change its privacy settings after the incident.

“Facebook is a great way to share ideas, our passions, pretty much anything,” Kao said. “But if we’re not careful about this social tool, communication could go awry. ”