I recently posted about a creative use of Facebook by a librarian at the University of Nevada, Reno that embraced social media to make history come alive.  Today, the Chronicle reported that Facebook has deleted the accounts representing each of the historical figures due to a violation of its terms of use. 

As much as I loved the idea, I completely understand why Facebook enforced its rule that users may not “provide any false personal information on Facebook, or create an account for anyone other than yourself without permission.”  There is a common trend among young users of Facebook to create false profiles of real people and post erroneous, inflammatory comments about them.  Maintaining integrity in social media is important. 

The Chronicle article reports that the pages received thousands of friend requests after the project hit the blogosphere and Twitterverse.  So, the good news is that people are interested in learning about historical figures through creative applications of emerging tools.  And the article also suggests that creating a Facebook Page about each of the historical figures may fall within the Facebook rules.  We’ll see.

Experimentation is good.  This is how we learn to define the boundaries of our of new digital landscape and understand how we can apply it to learning.