The Changing Face(Book) of Education

In what has to be a sign of how much education has changed, Stanford students now have the chance to take a course in building software for Facebook, the immensely popular social network started by a Harvard drop out. As far as anyone can tell, Stanford is the first university to offer a class on developing applications for the networking site.

According to articles that have been released, Dave McClure, one of the two instructors for the class, states that the class is “for people who want to create start-ups. Facebook is more of lab environment for figuring out how to build those start-ups.”

Indeed, it appears that the critical components of the course are the business and entrepreneurial aspects. Notes Rodney Rumford, publisher of FaceReviews.com, “there’s no one more employable right now than someone who can program in Facebook.”

Facebook was founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and began as a socializing site for his fellow Harvard students. Today it counts 43 million users with 200,000 more joining each day.

The instructors (BJ Fogg, director of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, co-teaches with McClure) indicate that the Stanford class is designed to focus on engagement theory, project management and marketing. The curriculum seeks to create three student groups who must create two Web-based software applications. One must be a program that will be of general interest to all Facebook users while the second must involve the use of Facebook as a learning tool.

In making the course a lab environment that provides true relevance, one aspect of a student’s grade will come from the number of people who use the new applications that have been created. We could find a course syllabus but we could not find what the level of interest must be in order for a student to earn an A.

But that was obviously of little importance to students. Initial enrollment was listed as more than twice the seating capacity of the classroom.