OUseful Info

Helping Students Make More of Facebook Without Stealing Control...

Sarah Horrigan's Kinda Learning Stuff has been kinda doing it for me over the last few weeks, and so I've duly nominated it....

Sarah's latest post - Get out of MySpace! - picks up on something that keeps being restated (that students don't necessarily want their teaches invading their social spaces) with a bit of personal commentary:

Although the idea of life-long learning is a laudable one, we all have different versions of ourselves which we reveal or hide according to our own choices. Sometimes we want to learn in public... sometimes we want to learn in private. It's up to us to invite people in to those private spaces - if we choose to. I'm not sure if there's an issue of respect for boundaries here or of complex power relationships which also need to be respected - but just saying 'because students like using this, they'll like using it to learn' doesn't logically follow.
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I think that ownership and control over environment are important and there's something mildly uncomfortable about 'friends' from one context being introduced to 'friends' in another.

Observations like this, of course, provide one of the drivers of the "groupings" meme, which argues for social network management tools that support faceted personal profiles, as well as a "me-first" principle for designing social tools (how many Stowe Boyd coined terms did you spot in that sentence?).

One of the things we spent quite a bit of time discussing when we first came up with the idea of the Open University Course Profiles Facebook application was the principle that we didn't want to force the application on to anyone; nor did we want to tie in to institutional student record systems and produce a 'formal' institutional application.

The idea was simple - we would provide a tool that would provide students on Facebook with a personal benefit by helping them to enrich their profile with a course profiles badge that listed their OU courses, and then optionally provide them with a social benefit that would allow them to discover each other through that voluntary display of personal information, that is, through a shared declaration of their affiliation with a particular course.

The Course Profiles application is controlled by the students. It is voluntarily installed, and users decide which courses they want to declare (we don't check that they ever have studied - or are studying - a particular course).

Users can optionally discover other users who have declared a particular course using the "Find a Study Buddy" service. Personal privacy setting allow users to determine who can discover them using this service (no-one, only friends, friends and network members, or everyone).

Again - the user is in control.

We don't try to get everyone on a particular presentation of a course to befriend each other, although we can help users find other like-minded ("like-studying") people on the course, if they have declared it using the application and if they are happy to be found.

We can also show users which of their friends has studied a course.

(This also helps spread the application - if you know one of your friends has studied a course and can't be found via the relevant Course Profiles course action page (see the figure above), you might invite them to install the app... ;-)

Although we can't provide private groupings, the application interface does support the de facto emergence of friends groupings around particular courses.

I've started noticing an increasing number of student created, course related groups on Facebook, and our next dilemma is whether we try to cross-promote them from within the Facebook application. My feeling is it would be better if the group creator opted to affiliate their group with our application so that it could be discovered from the application?

And finally, Brian Kelly suggests that institutional IT developers "need to engage with successful widely used services". Our Facebook application is to all intents and purposes a skunkworks project; the specification is evolving through discussion between ourselves and our users and whilst there are occasional hiccups and bugs discovered in the wild, we're (i.e. Liam;-) is fixing them in public with the help of the users.

I like to think the Course Profiles app is helping to provide a useful service - certainly, the uptake has been good; 900 users since the soft launch at the start of October. The activity is okay - around about 105% active a day. We're looking at ways we might try to facilitate wider use, but we're wary of intruding...

PS here are some application user install stats (and an application valuation!) via Adnomics: Course Profiles app install stats

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Tags: facebook, groupings, skunkworks

Posted by ajh59 at November 9, 2007 11:42 PM