The Treehouse

The Treehouse

Originally uploaded by sacolton.

Barbara Fister has an interesting post with a great title over at ACRLog: Creepy Treehouse. She writes about Blackboard setting up an application for Facebook with the idea that students might want to check their academic stuff from within the “social” world of Facebook. She wonders if there isn’t something a little icky about trying to fit academics into Facebook. Here’s what the “creepy treehouse” thing is all about:

A creepy treehouse is a place built by scheming adults to lure in kids. Kids tend to sense there’s something creepy about that treehouse and avoid it. Hence, a new definition: “Any institutionally-created, operated, or controlled environment in which participants are lured in either by mimicking pre-existing open or naturally formed environments, or by force, through a system of punishments or rewards.”

It’s an interesting take on that vaguely unsettled response we sometimes get from students when we try to be too cool, try too hard to seem fun and playful, when we make familiar toys unpalatably “educational.” Setting up an outpost in an attractive playspace with an ulterior motive is just . . . creepy.

I’m not really buying this “creepy treehouse” thing (though I do admire the phrase) as far as it applies to putting a Blackboard app in Facebook. Facebook is huge, and contains many different kinds of people using it for many different kinds of things. It seems reasonable to assume that a small percentage of students would find a Blackboard application worthwhile.

Also, remember how people use Facebook; they have complete control over their profile. They don’t have to walk past the Blackboard application or the librarian profile every day. If they are into that kind of thing, they add the application or become a fan of the library or add the librarian as a friend. If they don’t, they ignore it and no one feels molested.

Aside from the slightly dopey language on the main application page (“Let’s face it. You would live on Facebook if you could. Imagine a world where you could manage your entire life from Facebook – it’s not that far off!”) I don’t see anything too smarmy or creepy about this Blackboard thing. Creepy is as creepy does, and this particular case looks pretty straightforward to me.

I do think that librarians and others need to pay attention to the cultural norms of Facebook or other online sites, and I think it would be a huge mistake to assume that a presence in Facebook makes one cool, or will immediately result in lots of attention. But in general, I find Jessamyn West’s post Why should libraries be socially networking? more convincing than this notion of the creepy treehouse.