I’m also not arguing against universities having an ‘official’ space on Facebook – and I agree that there is also a possible role for Student Unions here. What I’m not sure of is that this in anyway will stop the ‘fake’ groups appearing or being mistaken for something more official. (as an aside, my bank has a policy of not communicating to me by any online channel except a secure messaging system I access via my online banking service – they make this clear to me and allow me to dismiss any emails etc. as spam or phishing)

I absolutely agree that Facebook (and other social media) are breaking down those boundaries between the personal and professional. This goes both ways – I know academic staff who won’t appear on Facebook under their own name because of not wanting to be found and friended by students.

Something that is perhaps missing from the report is more consideration of how people manage their online identity. It seems to wrap this up with Information Literacy – which isn’t quite how I’d see it, although they are linked a bit.

I have nothing against unofficial groups – but when external companies notice Universities not setting up anything official, and step in, impersonating the universities – that, I would suggest, is problematic.

Does that mean universities always appear “desperate” by setting up uni-maintained groups? My view is that Universities would be reacting to a demand. Sure, some students will find the idea of official groups lame. But evidently others are looking for those, and finding Fast Student Cash, dressed as their university. If there is demand an an expectation for these groups to exist, the expectation should be met, and better met by the University itself than some dodgy company. (It may be Students’ Unions who would be in a better position to create semi-official groups than Universities themselves, though.)

With regards to actual person-to-person social interactions (rather than mere creation of an official social space online), I have found that some of my students have found me, and “friended” me, to my surprise. They are a minority, but it was a bit baffling when it first happened. It seems that, just as Facebook is eroding boundaries between personal, social and professional relationships in many offices, so it is also eroding the boundaries in some student-teacher / lecturer relations. Facebook seem to be aware of this, and are constantly adding new filtering tools to respond to this increasingly confusing situation. I’m just not convinced that most people are really using the filters yet…

The various ‘XXXX Uni Freshers 2009′ groups seem to be a front to advertise a website “FastStudentCash.com” – this is linked to from a first discussion post in each group labelled “▀▄▀▄▀▄ TOP TIPS FOR FRESHERS WEEK ▀▄▀▄▀▄”

Once you have registered with Faststudentcash.com it seems to be basically a website full of ‘get rich quick’ type schemes – gambling with ‘systems’, cash for links schemes – mixed with attempts to sell items like ‘make your own alcopops’ kits etc.

Of course, there is a problem here in that there are many ‘freshers’ groups that are not ‘approved’ by the institution in question, and yet are a genuine attempt to form an online community – so whereas the group “Sussex Uni Freshers 2009″ contains ads for faststudentcash.com, “NORTHUMBRIA UNI FRESHERS 2009!” does not and looks like a genuine group setup by freshers or students at the university.

Some signs of the ‘faststudentcash’ setup groups seems to be:

Use of a generic ‘freshers’ logo rather than the institutions logo
Some generic introductory text opening with the line “This group is for all the new people starting or hoping to start our Uni in 2009.” (note the omission of the name of the University here)
The presence of the TOP TIPS FOR FRESHERS WEEK in the discussion forum
No real people as ‘Admins’ – just the name of the institution (don’t expect the spelling to be perfect) e.g. “Robert Gordan Universities”

Now to try to make this comment vaguely relevant to the post :)

Several of these groups have a reasonable number of members (e.g. 200-300) – and generally the TOP TIPS post seems to have been ignored in favour of simply posting information and comment to the group Wall. Some of these groups really seem to have an active fresher population. What is interesting here is that by use, the students have essentially made the group there own anyway – you are sharing with peers, rather than with companies. Now obviously the people at FastStudentCash could seed the group with people to promote their site – but so far I can’t see any evidence of this. In a sense the more genuine people who sign up (i.e. people who are going to be freshers at the relevant university) the more the group becomes what it says it is.

There is some evidence that the ‘freshers’ don’t take the postings promoting faststudentcash at face value. In the “Bangor Uni Freshers 2009″ group there is a student/fresher response to the TOP TIPS post questioning what FastStudentCash is, and suggesting the student is rightly wary of it – but also suggesting confusion about whether the links are being promoted by the University or not.

There is the question of whether setting up ‘official’ groups would in anyway stop the unofficial groups also appearing – I found at least 13 groups that were related to Sheffield Hallam Freshers 2009 – presumably a maximum of 1 is ‘official’. I can’t see why some of these are more popular than others (ranging from 2 members for the least popular to over 1100 for the most popular) – although it doesn’t seem to relate to ‘officialness’ or indeed content.

http://cuwebd.ning.com/forum/topics/facebookgate-uk

(eg http://cuwebd.ning.com/forum/topics/facebookgate-uk )

Brad Ward in the US seems to think that duty of care now means Universities should put an official presence on Facebook, to avoid students falling into the trap of scamsters like the ones mentioned in that discussion. I’m inclined to agree with him.