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The Facebook lessons
(avlxyz – http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2077892948&size=l) So, as I said in my last post, this will be the year Facebook fades away for many of us. It won’t disappear – I’ll probably have a Facebook profile still, but I just won’t use it much, rather like I have a LinkedIn profile that I never do anything with. So, before it goes and we become all dismissive about it, here are some of the good things the Facebook experience taught me. I am focusing here on personal lessons rather than the more general business models, or social network success factors which have been widely commented on (e.g. having an open API): Social networking wasn’t…
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Facebook – the holiday romance
(Steve Sawyer – http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevesawyer/1443530999/) One thing is certain for this year – it will be the year we fall out of love with Facebook. I know, I know, we only fell in love with it last year. As I’ve commented before, my Facebook use has dropped off considerably with the use of Twitter, and this week I’ve seen D’Arcy Norman announce his deFacebooking (as he put it in his status ‘The ugly, it burns’), and via my Twitter stream Scott Wilson performing a kind of Facebook striptease, or deconstruction, as he removed the various apps, left groups, deleted his profile pic, etc. Yes, Facebook will definitely fade this year. But…
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The tension between out there and in here
Following on from the Facebook post, the work we have done has raised some interesting tensions between developing for a third party platform and those services provided by the institution, such as the VLE. These will be issues that many universities will have to face in the coming years, so I’ll list the ones I think are important here. I don’t have any answers to them, I just know they’re things we can’t ignore. I’ll use Facebook as an example to illustrate the points, but they can apply across nearly any third party application which isn’t directly integrated into the formal learning experience. Does having interaction across multiple platforms dilute…
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Not an Eddie, but a Downesy will do
Tony, Peter and I may have just missed out on getting an Edublog award for the OU, but bless Stephen Downes, he’s come up with his own alternative list. This time the OU Facebook Project gets an award for ‘Best educational use of a social networking service’. He says: What makes this different from the typical use of a social networking service is that it is substantially about using a social network service to support learning, rather than simply using it to connect the same old group of people together. What I mean by this is that it is intended for students and that it inserts a useful educational service…
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What web 2.0 apps would you least like to lose?
This is sort of web 2.0 desert island discs (I know lots of people have done this before, e.g. here and here). Having heard stories of people having their Flickr or Facebook accounts pulled, I wondered what would be the service I would least like to lose? Here are my top three: Blog – okay, it’s not a single service as such and pre-dates the use of the term web 2.0, but it’s my list, so I’m bundling it in. As I said in my post of why educators should blog, I see the blog as the base camp for your online world. Everything else spreads from this identity. For…
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Status wars revisited
Back in September I posted about the status wars between Twitter and Facebook. At the time you couldn’t get Twitter to update your FB status. A couple of people had cracked it but been told by FB to remove their code. I argued that FB don’t want Twitter to update the status because that is the key to stickability for them. I was wrong in that Facebook does now allow Twitter to update status (I thought they wouldn’t allow it). But I was right in that this is a problem for Facebook stickability. At least that’s my experience, and it’s interesting to reflect on the subtle difference between your Facebook…
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In yer Facebook
A few people have blogged the Guardian report "Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace", based on the JISC project, in which the message from students seems to be that they want a separate space and don’t want universities and educators invading it. This will be all that many doubters need as justification to say that we shouldn’t be bothering with all this social networking stuff. Here’s why I think we should ignore that advice, or rather we should ignore it in a particular way. Firstly, the use of networks changes – after the initial flurry of hitting people with a wet fish or becoming a vampire, people’s use of…
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Some quick opensocial thoughts
What with travelling back from Oz and catching up on work I’ve not had time to really look at Google’s opensocial much. Not that there is much to look at currently, except some big announcements. If you don’t know what it is, it is an open API approach from Google with a host of partners to allow users to easily create social tools which can be used in more than one location. So, here a week later than everyone else, are my thoughts on it. Let’s get the Facebook thing out of the way first – opensocial is the social networking technology equivalent of a politician waiting to see what…
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A lexicon for the virtual/real world intersection
It strikes me that there are a number of new social behaviours that are arising when our online/web 2.0/social network selves intersect with our real, physical, everyday lives. So, while awake with jet lag I started compiling some new terms. I have put these up in a Wetpaint wiki, so you can add to them yourselves: Twintle – a knowing look someone gives you when you meet them face to face, who is also a Facebook friend or Twitter follower, where they debate whether they should mention your status updates, or whether that would be impolite. e.g. "I met Kathy the other day, and I’d been saying about how much…
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First OU Facebook app
I’ve been working with Tony Hirst, Stuart Brown and Liam Green-Hughes at the OU to develop some applications for Facebook (okay, they’ve been working, I’ve been talking about it). We now have a semi-official OU Facebook project, the aim of which is to develop some applications we think will be interesting to OU people in Facebook. The aims of the project are to: Gain experience in developing tools for a platform such as Facebook Gain knowledge as to the type of tools and widgets that are popular Observe patterns of use of these tools Generate traffic and students for openlearn and the Open University Gain an understanding of how learning…
