January 11, 2007
OpenLearn Courses Teasers on MySpace
Not of my doing, this simple (and one would like to think effective?) strategy for using the blogging tool on MySpace on the 'official'(?) OpenLearn MySpace page:
Generate a teaser question and point to the OpenLearn course that covers it...
There are a couple of issues I have with the actual presentation, of course... Like displaying the horrible URL for the course resource (why not use sensible link text?)
The bold "Question 1" heading is a bit authoritative... but maybe the MySpacers need to be disciplined? ;-)
It would have been easy enough to write the piece in a chatty way. For example:
Evolution through natural selection
Did you know that female guppies begin to breed as soon as they become mature (at about three months old?!?!)
They then produce clutches of eggs, most of which become fertilized, at roughly one-month intervals until they die or become too old. Clutches vary in size from one to 40 eggs (sounds painful!); the average clutch contains about 10 eggs (I wonder what the chances there are of there being twins?! ;-). Thus, female guppies produce a large number of offspring during their lives, far more than can survive to maturity.
Someone's probably worked out a formula for it: number of kids = average clutch size *, err, oh well, number of kids = LOAAAAAAAAAAADDDDDDDDDDDSSSSSSSS.... :-)
Here's one for you, that I got from the OpenLearn site - see if you can find it out...
Suppose that, in a particular stream, somewhere, the size of a population of guppies stays about the same each year. How many kids from each female guppy have to make it to three months old, when they can start having babies of their own, for the population to stay the same size?
Find the answer on: http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=1646 (I did.... waaaaaaahhhhh)
'Evolution by natural selection. An OpenLearn chunk used/reworked by permission of The Open University copyright © (2007).' Published under a Creative Commons 'Attribution; Non-commercial; Share Alike' licence. [I have to say that ;-)]
Ok - so maybe not quite like that, but I'm not a MySpacer...
By the by, the image came from a search for Creative commons licensed content on flickr.
I guess I could have used the new Leafletter 'mini embedded flash web site' to put several images in, but no time... :-(
And finally, it's maybe worth mentioning that there's also some OpenLearn video posted up on the MySpace page too (using the MySpace video service rather than YouTube (like what I did ;-)). However, one of the movies was corrupted when I tried...
In terms of reeling potential students in, I wonder too whether it would be worth adding an OpenLearn_daily feedcycle feed to posts, where the feedcycles exist? It doesn't necessarily bring people directly to the OpenLearn site, but for a MySpace audience, I'd have thought ithat mode of delivery would be more palatable?
Posted by ajh59 at January 11, 2007 08:54 PM