May 12, 2008
Leaky Students and Semi-Permeable Course Boundaries - The Social Life of OU Course Codes
Over the last few weeks, I've started thinking about the "social life of URL's" and by extension the "social life of OU course codes". A couple of things have also prompted me to look again at social bookmarking (OUseful.info was heavily dominatd by social bookmarking issues in it's early days!) - one was an internal email, another was AlanC's Introducing students to social bookmarking.
Although many insitutional learnig environments are built on the assumption that we need a private place for students in the same cohort to work together out of the gaze of the public eye, the rise of social sharing sites means that course activity is starting to leak onto the public web...
In Facebook, there are now several dozen OU course related groups (set up by students themselves) and keyed by OU course code, as well as society groups, regional groups and so on:
I've mentioned many times that OU course codes are incredibly valuable to us in a loosely coupled world (e.g. OU Course Codes - A Web 2.OU Crown Jewel) so I've been wondering about the extent to which course codes are being used as tags for resources related to partciular courses. (Speaking personally, whenever I bookmark resources that I think may be relevant to a course I'm familiar with, I tag the resource with the appropriate course code).
And indeed, a quick look on delicious turned up several courses where students(?) have been bookmarking resources...
So it seemed to me, could we find some value from the public social networks building up around course codes, or add value back to the social sites with 'course hubs', using bookmarklets or browser extensions?
For example, if we have a course code, then we can maybe display a panel that links to a course description, or other course resources (such as derived OpenLearn resources)? In the simplest case, something like this maybe?
[The bookmarklet is still under dev - I'll post it when it's stable! The course title is pulled in via JSON from a Yahoo pipe that callers a Dapper screen scraper. The screenscraper scrapes the OU courses and quals page for the corresponding course. Unfortunately, the structural markup used on the courses and quals page is not as friendly as it might be, so for some courses the scraping doesn't manage to pull out e.g. the course description. I can see no good reason why we can't make courses and quals pages easily scrapeable, e.g. by defining a lite microformat to mark up course info, or expose course info by a lite, RESTful API (there is a prototype XCRI service, but it's too heavy...); so of course, we don't make that info readily available in that way... I;d suggest it on the Ideascale, but no-one would grok why I'd made the suggestion... which is maybe part of the problem...?]
Looking around some of the other courses on delicious, it's maybe not surprising that the the Digital Photography course gets a double exposure on both delicious and flickr:
So how else can we use this info? One way might be to build up social networks in public around course code tags, a bit like the way we built a course actions and study buddy finding service around course codes in the Course Profiles Facebook application.
But how ethical would it be to mine people's (peoples'?? anyone see the Apprentice episode with the special occasion cards?! ;-) affiliation with OU course codes - as hinted at by their use of course code tags on public, social content sharing websites, and display that emergent, discovered network via the use of bookmarklets or browser extensions?
In one of those 'in the air' type moments (if it's coffee time, check out Gladwell on "simultaneous discovery"...), a just posted post by Alan again on Research Ethics in the MySpace Era raises some issues I hadn't thought about whilst tinkering with the above...
A better analogy for research on social networking Web sites would be research on newspaper personal ads. Similar to a MySpace profile, the information is intended to be available to the public and invites correspondence. Both the personal ad and a MySpace profile may contain very personal and intimate information, but this information has been selected by its owner to be published in a public forum. The "subjects" might claim that they did not intend for the information to be used for research purposes, but they could not plausibly claim that the information was private.
One to ponder, maybe?
Tags: courseprofiles, delicious, coursecode, social life
Posted by ajh59 at May 12, 2008 10:46 AM