I found an interesting paper from The Internet and Higher Education which talks about the influence of Facebook on education from a perspective of faculty and students use. The link to this article is given as follows.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1096751610000278
This research analyze the frequent use of Facebook for faculty and students based on a survey on the use of Facebook and email technologies. Researchers found that students are much more likely to use the Facebook or other similar technologies while faculty members are more likely to use the the email or other traditional technologies. More specifically, this study found students and faculty did not differ significantly in how often they checked their Facebook accounts. Also, students tend to check email and Facebook while faculty who have Facebook accounts do not use it as they use via email. Even though faculty and students both use Facebook, they do not use it a great deal for instructional purposes. As for the satisfaction of Facebook, students are significantly more likely to agree that it would be convenient to use Facebook while instructors are significantly more likely to agree that Facebook is not for educational purpose.
Although this research investigates the influence of social media and technologies on higher education, it is still not clear whether or not Facebook and similar sources have a bright future as a mainstream communication tool in the higher education. Based on my own experience, Facebook are still limited in several ways. First of all, it sometimes can not be tracked for many important messages. Each email is automatically stored if there are important notifications. Secondly, if instructors put information in a Facebook group, many students will ignore these information as others will talk in the group and make the important information gradually disappear. Thirdly, instructors can not use Facebook to evaluate students’ performance and at the same to be recorded by the university. Using Facebook can be viewed as some informal notifications and will not be recorded by university’s system. Therefore, university can not have the communication data among instructors and students.
As is shown in the paper, due to the small-scale survey and limited universities, there is still a long way for social media to enter into the higher education. However, before using social media formally, students can use the social media privately, such as forming a discussion group which is more efficient than university’s system. If possible, several universities can work together to have a social media APP for students to use and also recorded the importation messages as backup. The social medias APP such as Facebook and Twitter still have bright future in the higher education.
Zhenyu's blog 
I want to add to this, that during my teaching career at the university, I had many issues with posting in Facebook for the students that they will never take it as a formal platform to announce. however, they might use it to escape from doing such assignments, so I decided not to use and announce it clearly during class that I only use emails to avoid any misunderstanding or confusing,
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Thank you for your post, Zhenyu! I have had teachers in high school utilize facebook groups just because it was not as common for high schoolers to not use their email. Since college students and faculty are given email addresses associated with the university, I do think it is easier to use email. One thing I think is important is that we know have Canvas, which we did not utilize in high school. Canvas can send messages to students in groups or individually, which is very useful. You can also make appointments through Canvas, which my biochem professor utilized when holding office hours. Facebook is useful but I think it is important to separate our social and professional lives.
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