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.
   

Recently Martin Weller and Tony Hirst ran a workshop in Digilab on Academic blogging, explaining how they both feel that writing and reading blogs has helped them in their work.

Martin wrote about the workshop on his own blog, so you can see his thoughts on the value of academic blogging, and his slideshow, here.

I found it very interesting that Tony, Martin and John Naughton (who was also at the workshop), all had different reasons for blogging, and different views about their intended audience. Tony blogs for himself, as a way to keep track of interesting thoughts or work that he might want to revisit later. Sometimes his thought process his helped along by comments from those who read his blog, but he doesn't always write with his readers in mind. John sees blogging as an extension of his work as a journalist, so he does have think about his audience when he's writing, and Martin tries to stick to the subject of edcuational technology, so his audience are his fellow practitioners.

Tony and Martin recommend that new bloggers try to write 20 or so posts in their first month, to "find their voice" and get accustomed to the process before they start publicising their blogs. After that, it's up to you how often you write new posts, although obviously if you make them too infrequent your readers may lose interest.