Birds of a feather session – social networks and web 2.0

Birds of a feather session – social networks and web 2.0

Thankfully a smaller session with only 30 people. However I got bored of the way the conversation went (mostly about social networks, not social learning tools) and ended up working on my presentation for tomorrow part of the time. Before next session, met Erin from Schoolcraft College in Michigan and she agreed with my assessment of the session, as she was there but didn't say anything either, which made me feel less insane.

Melissa from Seton Hall University – pushing out information through facebook
-would students want to become a friend of their information center?
-so they took a Fan route where they can push information, but they don't see the students' personal private photos, etc.
-have gotten a good deal of faculty to sign up to get this information (does require faculty using facebook though, as this is their target audience, not students - not sure I would've chosen facebook in that case)

2 people using the Blackboard Sync plugin – says that the students love it and use it a lot. Helps with students missing out on new changes.

Are people using Pronto? – 3 people

• Not getting very heavy use from faculty or them encouraging their students to use it
• Another one had it in development server – no one using it
• Another university had more success, but only in pocked of the university, such as really keen academics.
• Do we want to be online all the time, ready to chat with students? Suggested it was useless otherwise (though I am not sure I agree that you have to be there to facilitate the chats)

Should we have a university portal? Or just push all information out so students can use whatever portal they want? (Why not both? I think eventually students will all pick different ways to pull in the information, but is really premature to think everyone is using an RSS feeder and personalised portal)

Use twitter during the lectures to get feedback? Could have a log of the conversation afterwards which would be more useful than the lectures themselves. (Why not just get rid of the lectures and try something else?)

Someone asked if anyone used social networking and learning tools to evaluate lectures and lecturer created resources. Seemed there was a fundamental flaw in that to me, but other people suggested ways to try to get that to happen. Was going to have a word in private afterwards about having the students create the resources rather than just rate them, but then someone talked to this lady for 15 minutes and I gave up and went to lunch.