Popular Facebook group a forum for serious discussion, researcher finds

Brock University’s Camille Rutherford expected to find mostly idle chit-chat when she started a lengthy project to monitor activity on a Facebook site called Ontario Teachers: Resources and Idea-Sharing.

What she found instead was that this Facebook group, with over 10,000 members, is a serious forum for professional development – a forum used not only by Ontario teachers but also by educators from around the world interested in Ontario’s education system.

And she says her research points to how social media are serving unmet needs by allowing teachers – and potentially other groups of professionals – to connect and exchange information on serious topics in new ways.

“Most people think Facebook is for teenage gossip or planning your high school reunion,” said Rutherford, an assistant professor at Brock’s Faculty of Education and a participant in Congress 2009.  “But for teachers using Facebook groups, it’s not that. It’s about professional development. It’s not idle drivel, it’s a pragmatic attempt to increase their knowledge.”

Facebook has become a social phenomenon in a very short time. Created as a virtual gathering place for college and university students, it has grown into a forum for groups of all sorts, including professionals.

The teachers Rutherford was monitoring were mostly at the primary and secondary level. Most were from Ontario, but Rutherford found foreigners in the group as well – often teachers abroad who were interested in working here.

She monitored the group’s activities for several months, and found the group was no virtual staff room: Over 90 per cent of the exchanges were on serious topics that fit the definition of professional development. For example, she said one teacher would post a problem – about bullying, perhaps – and other group members would try to help solve it.

The strength of Facebook, and social media in general, is that the search for information is participant-driven. It was the teachers themselves seeking information – not someone telling them what they needed to know.

“As social networking becomes more popular, we will see more of that,” predicted Rutherford, adding that students who have grown up with social media know all of this instinctively.  The corporate world is starting to catch on, she said, with some companies setting up in-house versions of Facebook to tap into employee knowledge.

Rutherford said one question her research did not answer is why teachers with problems were going online instead of looking to their colleagues for answers.

She suspects – and she cautions she’s not done research on this – that the online forum is perceived as low-risk and non-judgmental, particularly for young teachers who might be intimidated by older colleagues.