Web 2.0 tools for communicating with students

The Digilab team was asked by the Open University Students' Association (OUSA) to run an introduction to Web 2.0 tools to help them review their communication strategy. As there is such a vast number of Web 2.0 tools available, we chose to concentrate on those the library is already using to engage and interact with our customers.

1. Facebook

The Open University Library's facebook page was one of our first forays into experimenting with Web 2.0 tools. We wanted to know if our users would engage in conversation with us, and have found that many of them do. Facebook's 'Insights' tool (only visible to the page administrator) also helps to track what attracts people to the site and what discourages them from following us.

2. Twitter
The library uses Twitter to ask questions of our users, or to share amusing stories that might not be considered appropriate for the website.

3. The Library News Blog
The Library News blog is used for more formal news and announcements and feeds into the home page of the library website as well as the library's Twitter and Facebook accounts.

4. You Tube
The Library has its own You Tube account, which we use for fun or experimental videos which may not be suitable for sharing through the Open University's main You Tube channel, which is where our more polished videos are available.

Linking it all together
There are several common features shared by many Web 2.0 tools, which make them all the more powerful for reducing the number of places you need to edit, whilst expanding the number of potential delivery mechanisms for that content.

1. Most of these tools provide an RSS feed which allows your readers to subscribe to the content you post, and allows you to feed the content into other sites.
2. Many also provide a "widget" or "badge" which provides you with some html code you can use to pull the feed from that tool into a blog or website - these can usually be found under 'settings' on the site you want to take the feed from.
3. Media sharing sites, such as Flickr, You Tube or Slideshare, also usually provide "embed" code which allows you to insert photos, videos or other media into your website or blog post in a way that enables people tp watch it without leaving your site.
   

Student expectations of technology

JISC have just released the results of a study they commissioned to find out what digital natives expectations are of the use of technology in university teaching.

• 65% ‘regularly’ use social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace or Flickr (females more than males - 71% and 59% respectively) and only 5% ‘never’ use them
• A quarter (27%) ‘regularly’ use wikis, blogs or online networks
• Very few ‘regularly’ take part in an online community, for example a ‘virtual world’ such as Second Life (8%)
• 62% agree with the statement ‘I expect IT to play a much bigger role in my learning than it does now’ with regard to their time at university, although qualitative insight suggest that perhaps it’s not clear to them how
• Of those who have at least begun the process of preparing for university application 50% have looked at or asked for information about the types of IT provision
• Of those who had looked at or asked about IT provision 42% said that there was more IT provision than they expected.

Personally, I'm not sure how to interpret that. Just because students use Facebook, doesn't necessarily mean they want their university to use it to communicate with them. Similarly perhaps their lack of social attachment to Second Life would make them more willing to enter it as a learning space.

Their conclusions are very interesting:

The traditional methods of teacher/pupil learning seem neither hierarchical nor outmoded to them. They see personal, face to face interaction as the backbone of their learning. It would be interesting and relevant to carry out a similar study with first-year undergraduates, who have begun to appreciate the many different ways learning can happen at university, to see if opinions differ significantly and if the potential for ICT is more easily understood once they have experienced the different teacher-learner relationships of university.

The audience for our research thinks that technology should:

• support established methods of teaching and admin
• act as an additional resource for research and communication
• be a core part of social engagement and facilitate face-to-face friendships at university

These principles run across all groups identified in the online research. Those who are leading edge users or have high use of ICT at school are perhaps more technology savvy and open to its use, but they do not want technology to encroach on their learning or social experiences.

Fundamentally, this age group suspects that if all learning is mediated through technology, this will diminish the value of the learning.

For more on Facebook see the OUseful and Ed Techie blogs.

Facebook - an educational tool?

When I first signed up to Facebook, only a few weeks ago, I found the interface a little annoying, because they wanted me to fill in my favourite books, and upload my photos all over again. Why would I want to do that when my photos are already on Flickr and my favourite books are already on LibraryThing?

Now, Facebook is letting it's users write APIs (application programming interface) which, means that these problems have been solved. I can now pull my photos and other information into my Facebook profile using RSS feeds. I can even share YouTube videos and other media using Splashcast.

One of the things I like about Facebook is the privacy it affords, as opposed to MySpace, which is visible to anyone.

Martin Weller has written an interesting post about Facebook as a learning environment. He says

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Technology acts as a pull factor - I've gone back to Facebook because I wanted to see what new widgets they had (I added in the LastFM one). This demonstrates something I was talking about with the openlearn guys last week, that is by doing fun stuff with technology you drive traffic to your site from the users of that technology who are keen to see how it is being used. In educational terms this means doing fun stuff with educational content so that people want to see what you've done with Google maps, or twitter say.

The social network is the starting point - rather than content being the main focus and creating a network around this, Facebook demonstrates that the network is the key asset, and then you add value to this.

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Are you connected?

There was an interesting article in the Guardian last week, comparing different social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Second Life. Facebook is similar to friends re-united, in that it allows you to search for your friends using their email address, name, or you can look people up by town, school or organisation. This is all very well and I have found old friends that I'd lost touch with. One thing that annoys me about it is that it asks you to enter favourite books, films, music into your profile, but doesn't let you pull this information in from www.librarything.com or other sites where you may have already set up this type of list.

MySpace does allow you to pull information in from other sites, but doesn't give you the privacy that Facebook does (in Facebook you can choose who can see which bits of info), and doesn't help you find lost friends in the same way. It does seem to work for making new contacts as people come together around similar interests, and has been very popular with up and coming bands.

I haven't tried Bebo, myself, but it sounds like fun as it as a white board your friends can draw on.

If you're a latecomer to social networking - this might be worth a read:
Guardian, 16 May 2007 Are you connected?