Facebook Page vs. Group: Which Should I Use?

I recently responded to a question regarding the differences between Facebook Pages and Facebook Groups. I use both extensively and thought I would share some of my preferences when making the decision whether to start a Page or a Group.

When to Use a Facebook Page

When we first started developing for the web back in the 90s, most referred to a website as a "web page." In truth, a web page was usually little more than a personal home page that was under the umbrella of a larger domain. For example, your "home page" might have a url like http://www.myisp.com/publicweb/~myaccountname. 

Ahh. The good old days. Try saying that url to a friend or family member in hopes they will find your website!

Like a "web page," a Facebook Page is a single entity that is part of a much bigger community on Facebook. Your Facebook Page is essentially open to anyone who wants to view the page, and by liking it, they can join the community and begin posting pictures, links, articles, or comments. There's some control from an admin perspective, but essentially, you must think of a Facebook Page as an open community focused on a topic, person, or organization.

Examples of Facebook Pages include:

• Churches & Nonprofits
• Schools, Colleges & Universities
• Businesses
• Causes (save the whales, etc.)
• Political campaigns
• Celebrities (actors, musicians, etc.)
• Media (CNN, NBC, KCCI-TV)
• Blogs (ThePioneerWoman.com, MichaelHyatt.com)

Facebook Pages may have a few "likes" or fans, or may have several hundred thousand (or millions).

The key question to ask when making a decision between a Page or Group is what kind of control do I want to have over my audience? If your open to having everyone and their friend be a part of your community, then a Page is the correct choice. Secondly, is the focus of your Page an idea, organization, person, etc., or is the purpose to facilitate communication to a select group.

When to Use a Facebook Group

Facebook Groups are an excellent choice for someone who wants to use Facebook as a means of communicating to a select group of people. 

For example, if you are on a college faculty, your college will likely have a Facebook Page for the college, but you would need to use a Facebook Group for your individual classes. Moreover, the only people part of your Facebook Group would be your current students. You may choose, therefore, to create a Facebook Group for each section of a class you teach for each term you teach the class. Your Facebook Group may only have a handful of members.

Here are the advantages of a Facebook Group:

• Complete control over membership by the Group admin
• The ability to post documents
• The ability to control what the public can see (open, closed, secret)

Most Facebook Groups will have a small number of members.

Recommended Instructional Applications for a Facebook Group

As stated above, Facebook Groups work very well with a blended or flipped classroom situation, in which you want to push a portion of your teaching onto the web. Here's how I use a Facebook Group for instruction:

• Link to articles of interest and request comment
• Create simple polls and surveys
• Link to videos or other media
• Upload documents or other classroom support material
• Link to Google Docs for reference or collaboration
• Respond to questions or comments
• Maintain a calendar of events
• Post announcements and updated class information

How do you use a Facebook Page or Group in your setting?

Total Recall and Your Digital Memory

Photo Courtesy of Flickr / Ian-S

Believe it nor, I actually started using Twitter on May 29, 2008. My first tweet? "celler: This is a test message from my cell phone.” One of those great moments in history, similar to your child’s first words, right? 

Total Recall

What is significant is that for the first time I have a chronicle of my thoughts and reading trends over the last four years, all captured in little 140 character text streams, all in one place. Why is this important? This past summer I started reading a book called Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything [Amazon.com]. The premise of the book is that with the technology we now possess, we can literally capture the ebb and flow of life as it happens. The authors (Bell and Gemmell) argue that we should be actively capturing every detail, every thought, every image, every sound that crosses our path. 

The benefits of a digital memory is clear: imagine the joy of experiencing the life lived by your great grandparents in great detail. Instead, all we have are a few grainy black and white photos taken at high points in their life. When I look at the family history my great grandparents left behind, I could easily combine both my maternal and paternal family legacies into one small envelope. Even with my grandparents, I have a better record, but it is spotty prior to the 1950s, when cameras must have reached a level of affordability that they became a common item in middle-class America.

The disadvantage is finding your way through an mountain of data, both analog and digital. It is relatively easy to index and search my digital trail for the past 10-12 years, but beyond that, it gets more and more difficult. The biggest hurdle is overcoming all of the technological changes and proprietary software that has crossed my path.

Take, for example, the 1980s. While I started using a computer regularly in 1984 (my first computer was an Atari 64 and then I moved up to an Epson Q-20, which ran on an old OS called CPM), my method of storing data changed every few years. The Atari, for example, relied on cassette tapes to store data, while the Epson relied on 5.25-inch floppy disks. Consequently, all of my writing from 1984 until approximately 1989, when I purchased my first IBM-compatible computer, is gone.

Even the 1990s prove to be difficult. My first word processor was Word Perfect. It wasn’t until 1993 that I switched to Microsoft Word. Much of my publication work was in Aldus PageMaker. While you can still open these files in their modern-day siblings, it is a slow process to sort through hundreds of files, open them in a modern counterpart, and save the file as a pdf.

Total Recall Projects

Using the simple rule of baby steps, the authors of Total Recall suggest you tackle one “total recall project” at a time. In my case, I have started collecting and converting my journal writings into a single format that should be time proof. (In researching what formats are time proof, the two that seem most recommended include plain text and Adobe pdf.) While this may sound like a simple process, it is not. I started journaling in 1984. My first years were all paper. Sometime in 1989, I switched to journaling on my computer. Over the next 20-plus years, I journaled in a wide variety of formats, from simple Word documents to various cloud-based apps (Google Docs or Zoho), dedicated journal apps, Microsoft Outlook, and more. Intermixed throughout are times when I clearly tired of the digital forms of journaling and reverted to a paper-based approach, like my beloved Franklin Planner.

So, for almost three months now, I have scoured old hard drives, countless directories, files, and books for scraps and pieces of my journal. What will be fun (not really) is when I have to begin “digitizing” all of my paper ramblings. At first I thought I would simply scan the pages, but in order to have a format that is truly time proof, I will probably retype the handwritten journals so they end up in simple plain text format.

Needless to say, I will still keep the handwritten journals. As much as I appreciate the ease of writing on a computer, nothing beats the memory of a handwritten page. Plain text, while searchable and easy to store, lacks all of the nastalgia of a handwritten page. Looking at my handwritten journals from the 1980s, I can easily remember where I was and what it felt like at the time I was writing those words. There is no similar sense of nastalgia for the typewritten pages. 

What does your digital memory look like? How are you capturing everyday life as it happens?

Texting While Driving

I watched a news story on The NBC Nightly News regarding the danger of texting and driving. In the news story portions of this video were shown; it is powerful.

Alternate Reality Games

This weekend while engaged in quite a bit of driving, I listened to the July 16 episode of The Maccast featuring J. C. Hutchins. The topic of conversation focused on Alternate Reality Games, a massive media genre that encompasses a broad assortment of communication methods to engage people in the topic of the ARG. The entire infrastructure is built around the web, so it becomes geographically dispersed as the game takes on a life of its own.

Wikipedia provides a more in-depth definition:

An alternate reality game (ARG), is an interactive narrative that uses the real world as a platform, often involving multiple media and game elements, to tell a story that may be affected by participants' ideas or actions.

The form is defined by intense player involvement with a story that takes place in real-time and evolves according to participants' responses, and characters that are actively controlled by the game's designers, as opposed to being controlled by artificial intelligence as in a computer or console video game. Players interact directly with characters in the game, solve plot-based challenges and puzzles, and often work together with a community to analyze the story and coordinate real-life and online activities. ARGs generally use multimedia, such as telephones, email and mail but rely on the Internet as the central binding medium.

ARGs are growing in popularity, with new games appearing regularly and an increasing amount of experimentation with new models and subgenres. They tend to be free to play, with costs absorbed either through supporting products (e.g. collectible puzzle cards fund Perplex City) or through promotional relationships with existing products (for example, I Love Bees was a promotion for Halo 2, and the Lost Experience and FIND815 promoted the television show Lost). However, pay-to-play models are not unheard of.

Imagine how something like this could be used in an educational setting. It would be a project of great undertaking, but it would certainly engage today’s younger learners.

To read more about ARGs, explore the following resources:

• The Complete Wikipedia article on ARGs
• A Wikipedia article describing “The Lost Experience,” an ARG created to promote the television show Lost.
• Personal Effects: Dark Art (a novel by Hutchins with an accompanying ARG)
• J.C. Hutchins’ web site
• The July 16 episode of The Maccast

10 Tips for a Great Presentation

Another great post from Church Leaders Intelligence Report on great presentations. This time, they offered “10 Tips for a Great Presentation” by Steve Tobak. Here they are:

Connecting with an audience, communicating your vision and passion for your message, can be a beautiful experience. It's also a rare opportunity to make an impression that might impact the listener's future. It can either be a gateway or a roadblock to spiritual growth. Remember these tips:

1. The pitch. Start with your main point of view and a handful of take-aways. Then build a storyboard around that, one slide per thought. Keep the number of slides down and allow only a few minutes per slide.
2. The icebreaker. Start with something to break the tension (yours and theirs): a welcome gesture, engaging or humorous anecdote, graphic or video, or some combination. Keep it relevant and appropriate. Don't tell a joke.
3. The old axiom. Old advice, but it works: First tell the audience what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you told them.
4. Don't always read what's on the slide. Use the slides for brief cues and speak in your own words.
5. Engage the audience. Ask questions. If they don't respond, try offering an answer and asking for a show of hands, or ask easier questions. Make the audience part of the experience.
6. Be accessible. Don't stand behind a podium. Use a wireless mic, if needed. Get close to the audience and move from place to place while maintaining eye-contact, but only from time to time. Do not bounce around like a ping-pong ball.
7. Pause for effect and emphasis. Practice being comfortable with silence for two or three seconds. It's the most dramatic way to make a point. Avoid "verbal static" like ahs, uhs, and other fillers of uncomfortable silence; they just detract from your presence.
8. Make eye-contact. But only for a few seconds per person. Too short and you'll fail to engage; too long and it becomes uncomfortable.
9. Use hand gestures. They're engaging and interesting. But when you're not using them, keep your hands at your sides. Don't fidget, hold onto things, or put your hands in front of you, behind you, or in your pockets. Have a trusted friend observe your rehearsal to point out nervous habits.
10. Don't block the audience's view. Don't step in front of the screen or block it from view, except for the occasional walk-across. Gesture with your hand, but don't touch the screen. Don't use a pointer unless you must.

Adapted from Steve Tobak, bNet, 12/22/08

Remember, you weren't born with this ability; it takes practice. Be patient with yourself. Finding your own style where you feel comfortable comes with experience.

What tips can you offer that help take your presentation from good to great?