Spotlight on Digital Media And Learning

5.12.11 | In 2007,  B.J. Fogg, an academic who runs the who runs the Persuasive Technology Lab at Stanford University, developed a course to test some theories about behavior and the psychology of Facebook. The class assignment was to develop apps for people to use on the social media platform.

What happened next transformed technology innovation and start-up culture.

Miguel Helft explains in a New York Times story on the success of the “Facebook Class”:

Early on, the Facebook Class became a microcosm of Silicon Valley. Working in teams of three, the 75 students created apps that collectively had 16 million users in just 10 weeks. Many of those apps were sort of silly: Mr. [Joachim] De Lombaert’s, for example, allowed users to send “hotness” points to Facebook friends. Yet during the term, the apps, free for users, generated roughly $1 million in advertising revenue.

Such successes helped inspire entrepreneurs to ditch business plans and work on apps. Not all succeeded, but those that did helped to fuel the expansion of Facebook, which now has nearly 700 million users.

Venture capitalists also began rethinking their approach. Some created investment funds tailored to the new, bare-bones start-ups.

“A lot of the concepts and ideas that came out of the class influenced the structure of the fund that I am working on now,” says Dave McClure, one of the class instructors and founder of 500 Startups, which invests in lean start-ups. “The class was the realization that this stuff really works.”

Nearly four years later, many of the students have learned that building a business is a lot harder than creating an app — even an app worthy of an A+.

The story was a popular share. The NYT’s Learning Network turned it into a 6 Q’s About the News feature.

Over at DMLcentral, John Jones, who teaches in the Emerging Media and Communication program at the University of Texas at Dallas, reflects on the success of the class, not in monetary terms, but in teaching digital literacy:

[C]lasses like Fogg’s are perfect examples of how this type of teaching should be done: hands-on instruction in building new tools that are simultaneously designed to explore the theoretical and psychological impact of those technologies. This is the goal of the digital humanities and critical code studies movements.

While it is great that students can use these skills to make money, this success only serves to emphasize the importance of teaching digital literacy, including writing computer code. Just as the expertise that schooling provides in traditional literacies like reading and writing provide significant economic advantages to workers, so will digital literacies provide these advantages in the future.