[Offtopic] Facebook and staff productivity

[Meadows, Roslyn M]

Hi Maggie and others,

The problem with banning facebook or myspace or whatever is that there
are always another 3 thousand sites to take their place if your workers
really want to be involved in social networking. (Facebook partly "took
off" because the US military banned MySpace, yet allowed Facebook -
because that was the social networking choice of the officers, and was
therefore not banned from military bases - so many of the enlisted
personel just joined facebook!!)

A large number of our staff are members of facebook, but many of us are
far too overworked (and underpaid) to even think about it at school, but
most will have a play a couple of nights per week. (You might have
noticed my postings to these lists is always at night or on weekends) 

In reality I will say that there are SOME staff at school who always
seem to find time to sit in the staff lunch room and read the paper, or
do the crossword, or play the trivia games, yet I have never heard any
mention of banning newspapers from school. If you can find the time and
have the inclination you can find ANYTHING to be a distraction as a
student or a teacher. As the technology has changed the distractions
have changed. 

There are hundreds of sites which can be distracting, and no way to ban
or block them all - here is a list of some of the ones that have
featured predominantly in our school staff downloads list
	Carsales.com.au etc
	Realestateview and realestate and domain.com.au etc
	Ebay (obviously!) and other shopping sites
	Colesonline and safeway homeshop
	Commbank and other banking sites
	Vogue and other magazine sites
	Afl.com.au 
	
Basically it's all about dreaming of spending the money we don't have!!!
lol

And when you have finished dreaming there is always Paint, Solitaire,
your wedding or party invitation to work on, private email, filing your
nails, texting or calling your friends, talking about last weekend,
planning next weekend, talking about your ailments, dreaming of
retirement, planning your next vacation (only 12 weeks to go), etc 

Why single out social networking as the only distraction
workers/students have (well I know why - because it is easy to ban
facebook and myspace and feel as though the problem is solved, and so
difficult to ban social networking which occurs face to face in staff
offices or lunchrooms , not to mention all the other distractions that
exist)

Cheers
Ros	




Roslyn Meadows
Head of ICT Implementation
Head of Assessment and Reporting
Bentleigh Secondary College 
| 9579 1044 | 0412 614 062 |

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-----Original Message-----
From: offtopic-bounces at edulists.com.au
[mailto:offtopic-bounces at edulists.com.au] On Behalf Of Geoff Moss
Sent: Monday, 7 April 2008 1:29 PM
To: Information Technology Teachers' Offtopic Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Offtopic] Facebook and staff productivity

Maggie, I recall there was an article (Age Technology ??) on this about
a month ago.

There has been some discussion where some firms allow it for a specific
time (say, lunch time or for 1 hour) and they had noticed little
reduction in productivity.  Some other firms have banned it altogether
while other had not made any policy changes.

I'll look see tomorrow for some files I may have saved (I hope) that may
be able to help.

Regards

Geoff Moss
RMIT



> Maggie Iaquinto <IAQUIM at bialik.vic.edu.au> wrote:
> 
> I am looking for research on staff productivity and the use of
Facebook
> at work. Has anyone seen any dox for or against the use of Facebook at
> work? - specifically with the topic of reduced or enhanced staff
> productivity?
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks
> 
>  
> 
> Maggie
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