Facebook The New Study Group?
Your tutor goes through the ins and outs of your next assignment. Your attention fades in and out as you countdown the minutes till you can make a clean escape and join your mates at the pub.
Two words make you groan… Group work. You look around the room at your peers and wonder who will have the pleasure of your company for the next few weeks.
You lock eyes with a somewhat attractive classmate across the room and cross your fingers, waiting in anticipation.
Every university student knows group work can be a drag. Unless you get the right group of course, but getting the right group is much harder than it sounds. Usually you either get lumped in with the over achievers who constantly push the group into things they don’t want to do in the hopes of a high distinction. Or even worse you get the dead weight members and end up doing all the work.
It doesn’t have to be this way any more. In case you haven’t heard, Facebook is the new study group.
The room is re-arranged as you get together with your new group and numbers and emails are swapped. Barely two-minutes pass before someone suggests; “Why don’t we just make a Facebook group? I did it with my last group and it just made everything easier”, like they were the first group to come up with the idea.
You may not be super excited to give a group of strangers your Facebook addy, what if they Facebook stalk you? What if they like a picture at the very end of your album, suggesting that they looked at every single one of your photos? Well guess what? You should be excited.
Land a dud group? Is there that one member you can’t stand to be around? Well Facebook really is the new study group and you can do your entire share of work from the comfort of your own bedroom. Think about never having to face the social awkwardness or that creepy stalker student that can often wait, lurking menacingly at every group meeting.
Now don’t get me wrong. I have had my fair share of decent groups, I have been lucky. Usually the majority of students are bearable, if not pleasant and sometimes if you are really lucky the tutors let you choose your own group! Imagine that, almost like a democracy rather than a dictatorship!
It is almost impossible however, even with a great group, to all find time to meet up. For a group of four or five full-time, working, social twenty something’s, organizing a time that everyone will be available can be likened to pulling teeth.
Let’s be honest, we are all definitely at uni enough during the week, why be there when you don’t have to be? If you don’t already use Facebook for group work you are sorely missing out. This is why Facebook is the perfect replacement. Everyone delegates and plans via Facebook, submits their work to the group page and maybe, if absolutely necessary, meets at the end to combine the work and hand it in.
See this link specifically about Facebook Groups for Schools, Universities and Educational institutions: http://www.facebook.com/about/groups/schools