From the Guardian:
Online spaces are blurring, as universities that podcast and text their students have shown. The Jisc project manager, Lawrie Phipps, explains how the battle lines are being drawn: “Students really do want to keep their lives separate. They don’t want to be always available to their lecturers or bombarded with academic information.” [Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace! | Students | EducationGuardian.co.uk]
We are only beginning to explore the trade-offs between disclosure, either willed or as a result of usage data, and the services that can be built with that data. And we are only beginning to think about how to create social value in our applications. Much of the early work involves ‘pushing’ existing applications into social networking sites. However, this lacks the social dimension which characterizes the more successful applications there.
I liked Tony Hirst’s empasis on ‘pull’, benefit and incentive, and on value, personal and social, in his post on Facebook apps (which led me to the above article):
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. [OUseful Info: Helping Students Make More of Facebook Without Stealing Control…]
Via Sarah Horrigan via Tony Hirst.
