My first week with without my students on FaceBook
What a ride! I asked my (German) students, if they were adventurous enough to leave their beloved StudiVZ system, a German FaceBook clone, to try out supporting a brick-and-mortar seminar “Open Content for Education” with FaceBook. Much to my surprise, they were accepting the challenge with no long discussion. I already had set up a course in the Courses app: see for yourself.
We faced major stumbling blocks:
- FaceBook is missing a “student”/”teacher” connection. I am not going to become “friend” of all of my students, but without being friends, they couldn’t find the course
- Even worse, people needed to be part of the same college to access the course, but the system randomly assigned people to “Uni. Bremen” and “University of Bremen” and some couldn’t join the course
- The formating of the user contributed text in the Courses app is poor: no automatic link-activiating, no empty lines to put some air into the text etc. Looks like crap.
The end result? We have abandoned the Courses app and are now using a plain vanilla Group: Our new and great seminar group is just a click away. Join us in our weekly struggle with using FaceBook to support our seminar and learn about OpenContents.