Thanks for the clarification. Your approach makes a lot of sense. The ideas of layers, openness, interoperability are all great steps in the right direction. The more automony we give to students to control their own spaces how they want to control them, the better.

Jon

Thanks for the interest.

We have found through our experience with Courses that students are largely uninterested in using Facebook as a learning platform, but they are very interested in using Facebook to connect with people in their academic environment in new and different ways.

They use it to predict who they should meet, to follow up with people they have met, to create a perception of keep in touch with light-hearted interactions, to express themselves in a low-stakes manner, and to accelerate their personal relationships by relating more comprehensive self-concepts. Schools focuses on these concepts. As we said, we’re adding a social layer to what already exists in a campus environment, not competing with it. And, we’re tying campus relevant (and safe) information to Facebook.

Thanks for your insights.

Best,

Michael Staton

I know this is anecdotal, but I’ve had several conversations the past few weeks with students on my campus (BYU) about how weird it is to get friended by their professor on Facebook. Maybe new applications like this will force the culture of Facebook to change. However, I worrry that many will not find it a welcome change since they largerly think of Facebook as their *social* destination online, and not a *learning* destination.

What are you thoughts?

Well that definitely much better than I presumed. As long as there are options (i.e. using the app outside Facebook) I don’t really object.

However I do see some issues with what in effect is outfitting facebook with a seal of approval from various institutions when thinking about the various privacy issues that is associated with facebook (beacon, beacon^2, etc.).

However those are facebook-issues and not really LMS issues…

A start-up company called Inigral has recently launched a beta product that connects Oracle’s Campus Solutions Student Information System to Facebook. The product, called Schools on Facebook, brings student data (allegedly through secure methods) to ….

The data never goes to nor touches Facebook. Campuses can choose to have the app running in a cloud somewhere that we set up, or they can also choose to run it from a local server on their campus. Facebook can never get hold of the data.

In addition, students don’t “have” to create a Facebook account.

Just to clear any misunderstandings with the way applications work on Facebook, applications do not live within Facebook. Facebook merely presents a window for the application and communicates back and forth necessary information to make the relationship work (facebook id number, thumbnail pic, notification and feed item templates, etc.) Facebook couldn’t even get an applications data if it tried.

Hope that clears things up for you. Best,

Michael