The Ed Techie

OU tops Facebook universities

Brian Kelly has a post about UK universities on Facebook. He states that the OU is the most popular university on Facebook:

"The Open University Facebook page is the top of all University pages, with 7,539 fans (with the University of Michigan way behind in second place with 5,313 fans (up from a count of 2,874 a month ago). The other most popular UK Universities are Aston University (2,976 fans), Royal Holloway (1,765), Aberystwyth University (1,655 fans), University of Central Lancashire (1,475 fans), Keele University (1,420 fans), Cardiff University (1,357 fans) and the University of Surrey (1,166 fans)."

Now we might quibble whether number of fans equals most popular, but certainly if having student use Facebook were a goal (or, even better, if it was linked to funding), then the OU would be doing well.

I think there are three possible reasons for this:

1. The size of the OU student body - we have more students, so you'd expect more Facebook fans
2. Being distance education, the use of networks such as Facebook to connect with each other is more of a motivation for OU students
3. The Facebook apps that Liam, Tony, Stuart and I developed (may seem immodest, but bear with me, there is a point beyond ego massage).

Now the first two aren't factors other universities can do much about, they are intrinsic to the nature of the OU. But, if they wanted to have a reasonable Facebook presence (a debatable goal), then is the last one relevant? Does creating University applications increase your Facebook presence?

I'm afraid we can't answer this with any solid research, but here's some thoughts. I reckon the presence of our apps has three functions:

1. They make Facebook more useful to OU students. Well, obviously, you'd hope so, but by being able to find students on your course (through Courses Profile), share stories (through My OUStory), find someone to study with (through StudyBuddy), etc, the applications take a lot of the difficulty out of using Facebook as a supplementary study tool.
2. They help create an OU community. The tools facilitate students making connections and dialogue. This provides a motivation to return, and to share with other OU students who may not be on FB. It makes the adoption of FB a viral process amongst students.
3. It shows that the OU itself endorses (although it was only a semi-legitimate project) the use of FB as a study tool and thus eases some anxieties around this.

So, my hunch is that the OU applications have contributed to the OU's popularity on Facebook, but it is difficult to quantify this (unless someone wants to give me lots of money to research it).

Second OU Facebook app - My OU Story

As you may know a while ago a small Facebook team started up at the OU, to develop some apps and just learn about how you operate in this social networking space for the benefit of students. The Facebook team is Tony with the ideas, Stuart with the user testing, Liam with the coding, me with the... erm, yeah, well it's too complicated to go in to now.

The first app was Course Profiles. This allowed OU students to declare which course they were studying, had studied and were going to study. The interesting thing about this app was the way it could be used to drive other uses, e.g. we could use it as the basis for finding a 'study buddy'.

Liam has now finished the coding on the second app, My OU Story. This allows users to declare their mood relating to their study from a prepopulated list, and to add a 'micro-blog' type comment. It then displays a Mood Graph, showing your mood across the course. It also allows you to send a message to someone e.g. 'Keep going', or my favourite 'Be more modest'. And of course, all these actions show up on your news feed, so others will see it and hopefully respond.

Liam describes some of the techie stuff, Stuart talks about how it could relate to his own learning and Tony gives a good overview.

Tony will no doubt post about the usage, with some of his nice analytics, as it gets adopted. What is interesting for me is that conceiving of applications that make sense in this social networking world may have more significant implications for not only how we develop educational technology but also on what education may look like in a post-wikipedia/Flickr/YouTube world. The differences are quite subtle, and probably obvious, but they may indicate quite fundamental changes. Here are the ones I think may be important:

• People not content - our applications are aimed at facilitating interaction with other students, not with content. This is not to say content isn't important, and given that it's Facebook one would expect a social emphasis, but the significance of the social element is increased.
• Facilitation not direction. The applications are aimed at facilitating the interaction between students, which is at their discretion, not on directing student behaviour.
• Less control - we haven't specified _how_ the applications should be used, students will adopt them and use them for their own means. These are much less formal OU applications, at the moment no course team has made their use compulsory. This much looser system may not be totally scalable, ie there may be some tools that are mandated. But this applies to education also, there may be some 'mandated' content and activities, but also more variation.
• Small informal team - the Facebook team, or T.oAD, came about by Tony having some chats with Liam and Stuart. I joined later just to grab some glory, and also to help clear some of their activity higher up in the University. The work doesn't really fit in with many of the conventional management structures, mainly because people do it in their spare time. I was asked how the project was being managed once, and I replied 'by beer', because we tend to meet weekly for a pint and talk things over. I think 'management by beer' will become more of the norm, and institutions will need to find ways of interfacing this with the more conventional structures.

Disaggregated communication

I was chatting with Tony Hirst the other day and we were reflecting on how varied our communication methods were amongst the Facebook project team (Tony, Stuart Brown, Liam Green-Hughes and me). We sometimes use Facebook itself to have a discussion, or we might have an email exchange. I can't really see any reason for why we use one instead of the other at any particular time, but these tend to be discussions along the lines of 'have you seen this?'

Then there are our blog posts and related comments. Sometimes we will respond to each other's posts in our own blogs, other times we will add a comment, but mostly this type of communication is more ambient - I know what Tony is thinking about or working on, and just as importantly, he knows that I know it, so when we meet we have a shared foundation for conversation.

And then we have twitter - we all follow each other, and so will sometimes send replies or direct messages, but as with blogging Twitter really provides a background to more focused discussion. I will know what they are working on, but also it helps maintain a social bond which is vital in an informal team such as this.

Occasionally we need synchronous interaction, and will use Flashmeeting or Skype.

Lastly, we meet up for beers and cross paths at workshops and occasional meetings.

I've put all this is a compendium mindmap, shown above. It gets more social as you move from work meetings anti-clockwise round to the beer. So, at least from the point of view of this grouping, face to face is both the least and the most socially oriented.

What Tony and I realised was that we didn't really register that we had all these methods of communication. Using them and maintaining an overall track of the dialogue is not difficult, it just feels natural. The reason this may be relevant is that in education we worry an awful lot about communication channels with students and having only one main method. Perhaps this disaggregation of communication is not as difficult to manage cognitively as we once thought and actually allows each medium/tool to be used to its best advantage. This only happens if you're comfortable with the technology though.

The Facebook lessons

(avlxyz - http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=2077892948&size=l)

So, as I said in my last post, this will be the year Facebook fades away for many of us. It won't disappear - I'll probably have a Facebook profile still, but I just won't use it much, rather like I have a LinkedIn profile that I never do anything with. So, before it goes and we become all dismissive about it, here are some of the good things the Facebook experience taught me. I am focusing here on personal lessons rather than the more general business models, or social network success factors which have been widely commented on (e.g. having an open API):

• Social networking wasn't just for teenagers - prior to about May 2007 I had a few accounts in various social networking sites, but none of them did much. I read about kids loving Bebo, MySpace etc but I could often be found spouting the view that if you were over thirty they were of academic interest only, ie we liked to research them, but not actually use them (see below). Then Facebook reached a tipping point in terms of the people I knew on it (and these were people I liked and respected), and within a couple of weeks I was using it daily, updating my status regularly and building up a network.
• The social dimension is important in a professional context - my Facebook network is consitituted from professional peers who I like. Whereas LinkedIn seems to be professional peers who are potentially good for business. So what I discovered through Facebook is that the intersection of the social and the professional is what is important in my network, not just one or the other. This doesn't mean I have to have met the people face to face, but usually through blogs we have some form of dialogue. This is of course something you know instinctively in a face to face work context - it's not just who you work with, but who you like working with that is important. But finding a means of extending this without it being intrusive has been something Facebook has given me.
• You only understand it by doing it - as many people have commented (e.g. Ewan), in order to understand web 2.0 you have to act 2.0. I think too many academics are guilty of seeing social networking, or any popular tool, as something to be researched, but not something to be experienced and used. This is both rather a snobbish attitude and also misses the point. Signing up for an account, dropping in for a couple of weeks, doing a survey and then disappearing does not gain you an understanding of how these things are really being used.
• Control of the student dialogue is over - if it was ever real in the first place. We can provide some official systems for students to use, but we can't make them use them. Through developing the OU Course Profiles app we've seen some students using Facebook as their preferred mechanism for discussion over the official VLE. They were doing this anyway without our app, so the question is whether you ignore it or support it (and what 'support' means in this context) - but controlling or denying it are not options. We have to accept this in higher education - it's a messy, disaggregated world now.
• Universities need to be more flexible organisationally - the OU Facebook app came about because Tony had a chat with Liam and Stuart and they did it in their spare time. When I got involved it was to get some buy out of their time. The problem is that the OU, like all universities, doesn't really have the right organisational units or structures to deal with this new world. We have toyed with the idea of setting up a Facebook project, which would need official recognition and funding, have deliverables, a timeframe and end point. But, if you accept my proposal in the last post that actually we need to get used to a continual stream of tools we love for a few months, then you don't want a 'Facebook project'. You don't really want a project structure at all, you want people to coalesce around a technology, play with it, then move on to something else. This is a very difficult approach to realise in a large organisation where people have to be accountable for their time.
• Fun is the killer app - a fact not only ignored, but positively treated with disdain by designers of educational software (at least in higher ed). Facebook was fun to use, your average VLE isn't.

I wonder if I'll be writing a similar post about Twitter in a year's time.

Facebook - the holiday romance

(Steve Sawyer - http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevesawyer/1443530999/)

One thing is certain for this year - it will be the year we fall out of love with Facebook. I know, I know, we only fell in love with it last year. As I've commented before, my Facebook use has dropped off considerably with the use of Twitter, and this week I've seen D'Arcy Norman announce his deFacebooking (as he put it in his status 'The ugly, it burns'), and via my Twitter stream Scott Wilson performing a kind of Facebook striptease, or deconstruction, as he removed the various apps, left groups, deleted his profile pic, etc.

Yes, Facebook will definitely fade this year. But before the real backlash begins and we mock anyone who uses it, I want to reflect on its uptake. In the next post I'll look at what it taught me, and in this one think about what this rapid adoption and then dumping means.

The first thing to say is that it isn't really because of anything Facebook has done. I think you can find logical reasons why you're divesting yourself of it - privacy, Beacon, spam/bacn, the very annoying feature of needing to install an app in order to see a message someone has sent you, etc. But really it's just that it's served its purpose and it's not as much fun anymore.

Now, a lot of people will be very smug about this, saying 'I told you so - I knew it wouldn't last and so I didn't bother.' This is to totally miss the point. We knew it wouldn't last either - Facebook was a holiday romance, not the great love of your life. And like holiday romances it was to be enjoyed while it lasted and approached with full gusto and enthusiasm - otherwise there is no point to it. One doesn't engage in a holiday romance cautiously (obviously I don't engage in them at all anymore, but we're in metaphor mode here), that's not their role. Their function is to be short-lived, intense, and perfectly encapsulated. And that's how many of us approached Facebook.

I predict that rather like holiday romances, when you get back to the humdrum of everyday life you become rather embarrassed by the degree of passion you felt. Similarly, there will be an unspoken competition this year to prove that you never really liked Facebook much anyway.

I blogged before that I think we are monoamorous with regards to type of software, rather like football teams, so you only love one social network, one VLE, etc. But maybe what the Facebook episode reveals is that while we may be monogamous within these relationships to types of software, they are shortlived and we are always getting ready to move. The modern day educational technologist needs to think of themselves as something of a Henry VIII figure - always falling in love then cruelly discarding the object of affection for the next one. But with less beheading.

The tension between out there and in here

Following on from the Facebook post, the work we have done has raised some interesting tensions between developing for a third party platform and those services provided by the institution, such as the VLE. These will be issues that many universities will have to face in the coming years, so I'll list the ones I think are important here. I don't have any answers to them, I just know they're things we can't ignore. I'll use Facebook as an example to illustrate the points, but they can apply across nearly any third party application which isn't directly integrated into the formal learning experience.

1. Does having interaction across multiple platforms dilute the overall effect? For example, if a subset of students start collaborating in Facebook does this have a negative impact on the dialogue and learning experience for the whole cohort in the VLE?
2. Even if 1 is true, can we do anything about it? Many students are connecting and communicating via Facebook before they even start their courses. It would be unrealistic to expect, or to mandate, that they stop using whatever system they like for communicating. For example, someone else had already created an OU courses profile application in Facebook, so maybe it's better if we deliver these tools.
3. What are the privacy issues and responsibilities? If a university develops applications for a platform is it implicitly endorsing that platform? For example, in Facebook when you join a network the default setting is that everyone in that network can see your full profile. Imagine some unsavoury student X starts bothering student A through this. Student A only joined Facebook because her university had developed some tools for it and seemed to be encouraging it. Where does the responsibility lie in this case?   With the student (for not controlling their settings)? With Facebook? With the university?
4. What are the support issues? For instance on the Open University Facebook page some students have started raising tech support queries. Sometimes they get a response, sometimes they don't, since this isn't an officially recognised support mechanism. Logistically handling queries across multiple platforms will soon become unmanageable. Is this problem exacerbated if the university has a semi-official presence on the platform in question?
5. What are the real benefits? Maybe none, but I think there will be some subtle ones, which research will dig up over the next few years. Will they relate to educational performance, ie those students connected through Facebook tend to do better because they have better quality peer support and find a range of alternative resources. Or will they relate to motivation? Maybe those students in Facebook tend to drop out less because they have peer support and pressure. Or will it influence satisfaction? Students in Facebook tend to rate the course better because they felt better connected to the cohort. Or maybe none of these.

I think the natural instinct of universities (and particularly senior management) when faced with issues such as these is to think 'more control'. As readers of this blog will know, I tend to favour less control, but that doesn't mean it will be a smooth ride. There are some potentially very difficult issues, and a few legal cases, to be addressed as we blur the boundaries between out there and in here.

Not an Eddie, but a Downesy will do

Tony, Peter and I may have just missed out on getting an Edublog award for the OU, but bless Stephen Downes, he's come up with his own alternative list. This time the OU Facebook Project gets an award for 'Best educational use of a social networking service'. He says:

What makes this different from the typical use of a social networking service is that it is substantially about using a social network service to support learning, rather than simply using it to connect the same old group of people together. What I mean by this is that it is intended for students and that it inserts a useful educational service into the social network application

The OU Facebook team is really Tony Hirst, Liam Green-Hughes and Stuart Brown, with me on the periphery. There are now around 2,600 users of the courses profile application that allows users to find others studying the same course. Using this one bit of information you can then add functions such as find a studybuddy, recommend courses, comment on courses, and see what other courses people have taken. There are a number of other apps in the pipeline, which the team can tell you about in their blogs.

In the meantime here we are celebrating.

[UPDATE - Stuart Brown has some more info on the Facebook app, including users and projected updates]

What web 2.0 apps would you least like to lose?

This is sort of web 2.0 desert island discs (I know lots of people have done this before, e.g. here and here). Having heard stories of people having their Flickr or Facebook accounts pulled, I wondered what would be the service I would least like to lose? Here are my top three:

1. Blog - okay, it's not a single service as such and pre-dates the use of the term web 2.0, but it's my list, so I'm bundling it in. As I said in my post of why educators should blog, I see the blog as the base camp for your online world. Everything else spreads from this identity. For me it is the sine qua non of an online existence, and it's also the one I gain the most satisfaction from. If I lost this I would feel truly that my professional life (and personal to an extent) was the poorer for it. Blog - I heart you.
2. Twitter - yes, in at number 2, and the surprise hit over Facebook. I started back in September when I decided I really needed to give Twitter a decent run. And I'm converted. It makes me feel connected to a range of peers, in a non-intrusive way (unlike IM), it is great for finding resources, it offers access to a support network, and is also good fun. If the future is a hive mentality then Twitter is it's waggle dance. If I lost Twitter I'd miss out on feeling part of a broader ed tech community, hell I may even have to go to conferences.
3. Facebook - I still like Facebook, but as my previous post sets out, Twitter has removed some of the motivation to go into it. Facebook is slightly more friend and institution focused. At the OU we have started developing applications for Facebook, which I think will be a very good way for students to enhance their own learning experience (for instance they can find people on the same course, find a study buddy, recommend courses, and soon share their story, swap resources, etc). I'm sure something else will come along and replace FB eventually, but the questions it has raised about how you support learners in this space and take advantage of the community it offers them, without invading their space will be important ones for us to address in education for years to come. If I lost Facebook I'd lose access to some friends who I only have contact through this and I'd also lose a space where we can think about the future of education.

Honorable mention - Slideshare. I do like Slideshare, it's just neat at what it does. And recording bad slidecasts is my new favourite hobby.

And that's it - Flickr, Delicious, LinkedIn, 43Things, YouTube - I could live without them. I like them, but their loss wouldn't be as catastrophic for me as the above.

What are the three you would least like to lose? Remember to focus on what impact their loss would have, not just on why you like them.

Status wars revisited

Back in September I posted about the status wars between Twitter and Facebook. At the time you couldn't get Twitter to update your FB status. A couple of people had cracked it but been told by FB to remove their code. I argued that FB don't want Twitter to update the status because that is the key to stickability for them.

I was wrong in that Facebook does now allow Twitter to update status (I thought they wouldn't allow it). But I was right in that this is a problem for Facebook stickability.  At least that's my experience, and it's interesting to reflect on the subtle difference between your Facebook status and Twitter stream.

I tried going Facebook status to Twitter first, but that meant I wasn't really engaging in what I suppose I must call the Twitterverse. I think you don't post regularly enough when you do this, you don't read as many tweets, and you don't use conventions such as @ for sending replies to users. And I think other Twitterers (Twits? Have we standardised vocabulary yet?), pick up on this.

So I decided that I would go the other way, Twitter to Facebook. This works fine technically - each status update begins 'Martin is twittering:'. But again it's a bit unsatisfactory. A lot of things I Twitter I wouldn't usually put in my FB status. There is a subtle difference between the two. It's not absolute, think of it as a Venn diagram - there is an awful lot of overlap, but there are areas that are unique to each.

In this diagram (courtesy of the marvellous Gliffy), the Twitter circle is bigger, since you tend to update that more. There is an area of overlap, the type of standard status posts you might do 'In a conference call.' Then there is the Facebook only area - for me these tend to be a bit more pithy, aimed at the friends I know in FB and cover a longer period, e.g. 'Martin is working today and definitely not blogging, updating status or twittering.' And then there is the Twitter only area. This will contain the replies e.g. '@mweller - stop twittering and get on with work', the more frequent updates, e.g. 'on a train, stuck in a tunnel' and also those aimed at knowledge sharing 'good post on twitter status here'.

For me then the Twitter only area is larger, so if I have to make a choice between losing one of the two (because I can't be bothered to maintain them both separately), then the FB-only area goes.

The knock-on effect of this is that I use Facebook less, since one of the draws of going in was to update my status, and not to reject 'Be a vampire' notifications. Of course there is nothing about the FB status that means I couldn't use it in the way I use Twitter (apart from the direct messages and replies), but it has to do with the very subtle communication affordances of the two. If I'm honest, I probably prefer the type of updates I do in Facebook, but I'm getting more value out of Twitter, so that's the winner.

If my experience is true for others then the shine is off Facebook.

In yer Facebook

A few people have blogged the Guardian report "Students tell universities: Get out of MySpace", based on the JISC project, in which the message from students seems to be that they want a separate space and don't want universities and educators invading it.

This will be all that many doubters need as justification to say that we shouldn't be bothering with all this social networking stuff. Here's why I think we should ignore that advice, or rather we should ignore it in a particular way.

Firstly, the use of networks changes - after the initial flurry of hitting people with a wet fish or becoming a vampire, people's use of a network settles down I think. So how students feel about FB a year from now will be different from how they feel now.

Secondly, we provide tools and services that help them learn, but don't direct their learning. We are not 'in' Facebook in the same way we are 'in' a VLE, where we monitor progress and contribution. Rather, universities can provide tools (like the FB ones we are developing) which help students learn between themselves.

Thirdly, if this is where they are spending a lot of their time, it is convenient to have some of their formal learning data in here - even if it's just notifications of updates from their VLE. It acts as a base camp then for other systems. This will be the key to why students will want some form of university input in their social network - convenience.

But I do agree that we shouldn't go barging in there and imposing formal systems - they'll only go someplace else. Going out to where students are rather than bringing them into our systems (or doing both more likely), has huge implications for what you design and  do. As soon as you start developing tools for this space, a whole range of applications occur to you that don't when you are inside the formal education space - they tend to be about facilitating connections, adding fun and being viral. Because your app has to survive in the social network ecosystem, this makes you develop ones that are perhaps better suited to the learner's needs than when you control the ecosystem.