Communicating with a professor about issues such as homework assignments and exam dates may become more convenient than ever when the professor is part of a Web site many students check daily: Facebook.com.

"Facebook is so much cooler than ANGEL. I was talking to students last term and everybody goes to Facebook, so why not use what everyone else is already using?" Brian Smith, professor of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) said.

Smith is planning to experiment using Facebook instead of the ANGEL course management system this fall for IST 331 (Organization and Design of Information Systems: User and System Principles). The class is about making computer systems easier to use for the average person, he said.

The biggest problem with ANGEL is that it doesn't offer RSS (Real Simple Syndication), he said. With updated RSS feeds, the professor can be alerted when a new message is posted, and the student can receive automatic feedback, he said.

"If I don't log on to it, I don't know what students are telling me. If I have to go to it, that just gets hard," he said. He said with ANGEL, messages could be forwarded to his e-mail, but his e-mail gets bombarded every day with messages.

"The good thing about Facebook is that I can have new messages forwarded to my cell phone. I can be on the road and know if a student sent me something. If it's an emergency, I can just text back if I'm not near a computer," he said. "If you're looking for feedback from a professor, you want it right away."

He also said he likes Facebook because it offers a space for interesting, informal learning. After creating a profile this summer, Smith said he noticed IST has a student-run group on Facebook and students are sharing job postings and offering advice to one another.

"The fact that there are so many people sitting around on Facebook, I had to be intrigued by it," he said. "What is it about this site that draws millions of college students? Learning is a social activity, why not make it more fun?"

He is hoping to work with campus ducation Technology Services, which he said seems to be very interested in seeing how the experiment turns out. His ultimate goal, he said, is to eliminate the distance between students and faculty.

Some students don't like the idea of having professors on Facebook.

"I think it's a really bad idea because it invades personal privacy. People put pictures on Facebook they don't want professors to see," Jessica Baker (freshman-business management), said.

French teaching assistant Geraldine Blattner is a user of Facebook, but she doesn't communicate with students through it.

"I think that it may get too intrusive into a student's life. It reveals too much of the private life of the student that we, as professors, don't need to know," she said.

She also said she wouldn't know how a professor would be able to separate personal and school-related messages.

"I think it'd be alright, as long as they didn't use it as a bias for how they grade students. It would probably be a good way of communicating, but it could be abused," Bobby Cavalieri (freshman-business and marketing) said.

Smith said it is still not clear how he would have people upload assignments or quizzes, but they will figure out alternatives. Computing is decentralized anyway, he said, but Facebook may be the right place to do more communicating.

"It is very addictive," Smith said. "My first friend was my sister. She told me my profile was pretty crappy, but I'm in the double digits now," he said.