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]
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