This should be a gooding starting point for thinking about how we can utilize Facebook within our academic environment. Here's an earlier article I link to which makes a similar case.
For the upcoming Free Online Conference - Corporate Learning: Trends and Innovations we wanted to have a way for participants to get to know other participants and hold discussions. While we are going to use Q2 Learning's platform, we could have created a group in Facebook and used the threaded discussion capability there. The advantage of that is that likely a sizable portion of the audience is already on Facebook and thus wouldn't have to upload profile information. This also would allow the relation(friend)ships created during the process to exist beyond the conference.
