School via Facebook?

Is social media leading the world toward a wikitopia or a chatroulette hell? It’s entirely possible I think. Although I’m not entirely sure what those words mean. I’ll look that up and get back to this. I do know that I’ve become very dependent on Facebook to stay in contact with people. It’s been weird creating a new persona for myself on Facebook as part of this project, and using it so much for this class. Because I found out that I do worry about what people think of me based on what I put out onto Facebook. But at the same time, that’s something over which I have control; this way I can decide exactly how much information about me I want people to have, which in actual face-to-face life, I can’t necessarily do. But online it’s like I can control peoples’ impression of me, and I guess that was more what my side project was about: can I get people to accept a completely opposite persona of myself by changing the way I interact and present myself on Facebook? (For results, see the blog I wrote about the project: http://makepeacerantings.blogspot.com/ ) But it’s been difficult with this project, because I do use Facebook in daily life, so I was constantly worrying “oh, if I put this on my account, what will people think of me?” etc. etc. But then I just decided that I needed to have fun with it and make a very ridiculous persona. The problem was that since I was trying not to use my other account at all, I kept wanting to use my fake one for all the stuff I would normally do, so I broke character a bit. As for the class work we did involving Facebook, that didn’t seem too odd: classes keep branching out into different ways of connecting with students via the internet, I suppose Facebook was an inevitability. It definitely is more efficient for organizing than the school email would have been. But I worry a little that if Facebook gets too used by classes it’ll just turn into Edline, and stop being somewhere where you can talk to your friends about things unrelated to school, or complain about school. It’s kind of like going home in the afternoon: you physically separate yourself from school, and can compartmentalize in that way. I feel like if Facebook became more school-centered, it would lose its appeal, because it would no longer be an escape. Should schools and classes utilize social networking sites to enhance their curriculum, or does this defeat the purpose of these sites that seem to be primarily designed for social rather than academic use? I’m interested to hear peoples’ thoughts…