Sometimes, schools ban certain devices or services because they want to shield themselves from a lawsuit over what students download or because they need to preserve their computer network for work-related functions rather than play. However, neither of these are the reason behind Harrisburg University of Science and Technology’s unusual social media/networking blackout week. Harrisburg is banning social networking sites like Facebook and social networking services like AIM as an experiment to see what faculty and students would be like without their social networking crutches.
“Our goal is to challenge people to think about how they came to rely on (social media),” said Steve Infanti, Harrisburg University’s associate vice president for communications and marketing. “University faculty, in particular, use social media to communicate with colleagues about curriculum ideas, but what if they had to rely on face-to-face meetings? We wondered would the process take longer, or would the outcomes be any different?”
“It’s not that, as an institution, we hate Facebook,” added Harrisburg University provost Eric Darr. “Rather, it is about pausing to evaluate the extent to which social media are woven into the professional and personal lives of the people on the Harrisburg campus, and contemplating what has been gained and what has been sacrificed.” He okayed the disconnection from Twitter etc. because, as he says, “I wanted to make it real for people — not to make it an intellectual exercise.”
Students will be writing essays about how the lack of social networking affected them once the week is over, assuming they don’t spend the immediate hours after social media is restored checking their Facebook statuses and reading the news from the Twitterverse.
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