Learning MySpace: It's now a college class

Students often get in trouble for logging onto social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook during class.

At Elgin Community College, they're actually encouraging the habit.

For two consecutive March weekends, ECC will offer noncredit MySpace classes: Create MySpace and Rock MySpace II.

The instructor, Nathan Murfree, is an 18-year-old ECC student.

Murfree, a Sycamore native and MySpace user for the past three years, will instruct users how to create a safe and content-savvy Web page.

Murfree's mother, Heidi Brelsford, is a course programmer at the college, whose job is to come up with new ideas for classes.

"I'd been thinking a lot about the controversies around MySpace," she said. "One of the problems is when people set up a (MySpace) page, they don't know how to use the security settings. I thought, we should run a class, teach people how to create a safe MySpace page for themselves."

Her son, who recently taught her to put a MySpace page together, would make a natural instructor, she thought.

While other schools like Harper College, McHenry County College and Oakton Community College all feature Web design classes, none has narrowed its focus yet to social networking on the Internet.

MySpace, founded in 2003 by eUniverse, was recently rated the sixth most popular Web site in the world, according to Alexa Internet.

Free to join, the site is widely used by recruiters, politicians and musicians alike. On Tuesday and Wednesday, MySpace held the nation's first primary, in advance of both the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary.

Murfree plans to teach students little "tricks" of getting around the social networking site.

"I want to talk about the controversial issues around MySpace … Internet predators, precautions to take, communications -- simple things to keep them out of trouble," he said.

Murfee also has full expectations for students "to learn a little bit of HTML," so users can easily add surveys, video and music and change the look of their pages.

And, he'll teach them how to "steal stuff," like video clips, from friends' pages.

He'll also talk about long-term effects, like how employers can find your profiles via search engines like Google and how posting something on the Internet leaves a virtually permanent footprint, Brelsford said.

"Once you put something out there (on the Internet), it's there forever," she said. "People need to think about the image they portray in the future if they want to run for political office or something."

Just as with MySpace, you must be 14 or older to attend the class.

Classes run from 9 a.m. to noon on March 1 and 8 and cost $29 apiece.

Register by visiting www.elgin.edu/noncreditclasses.aspx.