Alan writes, as Mr Angry, in a comment to a post: "Facebook is another matter, but I can't see much educational value there anyway (beyond marketing) - for God's sake leave students some social spaces without trying to stalk them and shove learning down their throats!"
He also picks up on Coursefeed, an app that displays your course feeds from the Blackboard VLE in Facebook.
From the Coursefeed app page:
Browse your courses, post messages to the class, share notes - all without ever leaving Facebook. CourseFeed also alerts you when your professor posts announcements, tests, or content to your course. And you'll get alerts when classmates post to the course wall and share notes.There are several things going on here, I think. One relates to delivering information feeds and course news items raised in Blackboard to you in Facebook. This may or may not be useful. Another relates to sharing information between students on a course. Without exploring the app, I'm not sure whether this means discussing a course within the app itself or linking back to the VLE.
What the app does show (if it works as advertised) is how the back end of an institutional system may be integrated (to a limited extent) with a 'portable' widget/app front end in a space like Facebook. One question then is - can the information contained within Facebook - that is accessible to the app developer - be used to add value to the VLE-in-Facebook widget, in such a way that: a) doesn't upset the users; and b) fits in with the way users want to use Facebook.
One of the key constraints we imposed on ourselves for the development of the Course Profiles Facebook App (which allows you to add a list of courses you have taken to your profile, find other people who have taken the same course, and link through to OpenLearn content for that course, where it exists) was that we would not exploit any privileged access to OU backend systems. For example, we would not expose an information that could only be accessed via OU authentication. This was "enshrined' in our stated belief that anyone should be able to build the app...
The Coursefeed app has indeed been built "by anyone", but it requires that institutional credentials be submitted via the app to gain access to a particular VLE. I haven't chatted to Liam and Stuart about this, but my preference is that Course Profiles won't take that route either. I don't want to be in a position where Course Profiles is accessing information that isn't either: a) publicly available; or b) declared to the app by the user.
Another key tenet behind the development of our Course Profiles Facebook app was that it should leverage those portions of the social network graph that Facebook exposes to applications. For example, by seeing the public 'friends' network of an individual, we could add value to it by essentially creating personal 'course groupings' based around which of your friends is on the same course as you. By mining the Course Profiles data, the Facebook "social graph" can be enhanced by adding adding additional edges between people who have declared the same course, and so on. An exciting feature in development as more people add the app and declare courses is that we can now start to offer course recommendations along the lines of "users who declared this course also declared that one..."
A quick glance at the OU Network on Facebook shows many students have created groups for courses they are studying. Many of these groups only have a handful of members - who were potentially friends anyway? Or they may have been established by people looking for friends on a course.
What the formation of groups suggest to me is that some students want to create their own break out spaces where they can talk about a particular course outside of the university context (maybe because their VLE doesn't allow student created groups, maybe because they don't like the environment the institution offers, maybe because the setting is "too formal").
Within the Course Profiles app, we have enabled a comment/discussion area that provides a 'pre-created" space for people who have declared a course to talk about that course (or take anything, really - we don't moderate the spaces). In fact, you don't even have to declare the course to be able to comment about it (although you do need to have installed the app) - you can just hack the URL to get in (the comment areas are keyed by course code).
Declaring a course within Course Profiles this immediately provides you with access to two course groupings: a) your friends who have installed the app and declared the same courses as you; b) via "Find a Study Buddy", anyone who has installed the app and declared a particular course (subject to them setting appropriate privacy settings).
What I guess I'm trying to say is that tools like Course Profiles are not intended to 'push learning', but they are intended to support social learning activity, through supporting the discovery of like-minded people and facilitating discussion with them. For a distance learning institution like the OU, this social support can play an important role in addition to the 'official' support offered by the institution.
By making available links to OpenLearn material through the app, we allow users who might be considering taking a course to inspect some of the material released from it into OpenLearn - discussions with the OU library helpdesk suggested that course materials inspection prior to a course was a common request.
What is perhaps surprising is that in recent years, the OU hasn't been aggressively innovating in this area, compared to years past; (the OU has been running online conferences to support courses for years, for example...)
PS see also Are Social Sites Good for Educating?
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Tags: facebook, course profiles
Posted by ajh59 at November 24, 2007 02:59 PMWhile I'm sure the OU application was designed with the best principles in mind, my concern is that's not how at least a proportion of students will perceive it. If they regard Facebook as truly "social' space rather than as an extension of academic life, any university presence may well be perceived as an intrusion, especially when you take into account the networking tendencies of Facebook can make it look, at least to less experienced users, that they are being stalked via private information they provided to another party.
"While I'm sure the OU application"
By which you mean Course Profiles? A Skunkworks project that has no official standing, although it has in part been co-opted post hoc by people far more important than the app dev team to provide evidence about the use of social stuff in an OU context for another project.
The only Facebook application that has OU in its title is one designed and built by a student ('OUCourses'). Its premise is the same as Course Profiles - display course badges - but I think ours is better executed.
"any university presence may well be perceived as an intrusion, especially when you take into account the networking tendencies of Facebook can make it look, at least to less experienced users, that they are being stalked via private information they provided to another party"
I guess one thing we might consider is declaring we'll be using a use/design pattern that states information provided by the app is limited to info the user pulls to themselves through it (or that they choose to subscribe to, maybe?), or that is "pushed" to them by other users?
That is, we as unofficial, could be anyone, developers, should not let "the institution" use the app? ;-)
I'll be posting about this in a little more detail next week some time...
tony
PS how do your students get on with the way you invade their personal space with your podcasts?;-)
Posted by: Tony Hirst at November 25, 2007 05:04 PMThey view the podcasts as an intrusion if they are delivered via what they regard as social channels. Hence they will listen to them on computers, because computers are for "work" whereas they will not put them on their mp3 players or mobile phones (purchased with their own money), because these are social devices. More info: http://tinyurl.com/2acskt