Section of a Facebook friend wheel

Some of my fellow faculty members at the Michigan State University School of Journalism and I believe that Facebook is teaching our students Web skills.

In just the course of this school year, we notice that more students are coming into our classes knowing how to upload photos, post video and audio.

Bob Gould, Dave Poulson, Karl Gude, Nancy Hanus and I were talking with Robin Sloan of Current when it struck us. An MSU grad, Sloan is one of the writers and producers of EPIC 2014. He makes people think.

Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, Flickr and other online tools are giving them the opportunity and motive to combine media into one report. We think it carries over into the classroom, where we can now spend less time showing them how to post their media and dedicate more time to the journalism.

The idea of an old dude (me) showing kids (you?) how to embed videos cracks me up. Maybe it should scare me. And to be sure, I have always, in more than 30 years of part-time teaching, had students who know more than I do. I survived my first journalism teaching assignment — photojournalism — because I struck a silent pact with a student who got me through wet-process film developing and did not out me as a newbie. He got a very good grade.

Although every class seems to have a digital wizard in it, not all students are on the same page, But Facebook is getting them there as they post sweet or funny things for their Facebook friends. And that is a teaching lesson in itself — we learn the things we find interesting or necessary more easily than we learn the things that seem irrelevant.

So, maybe the best way to learn something is by opening a new account, rather than a book or a Web site.

Thanks, Facebook!