Working with FaceBook in a conversational course
This term I am doing a “conversational” course with a group of students, mashing a post-structuralist and an ecological discourse style. As you can read in the previous posts, my students agreed to use FaceBook (which is not as popular here in Germany as in the US, here every student is member of studiVZ). We had some hard time at the beginning, but now it is running more smoothly (have a look at it at our Facebook group Open Content and Open Education (content is in German). Alas, it is not very different from the typical use of a platform such as Moodle, stud.ip. Maybe it is even more restricted.
When I planned the course I really was betting on the usage and integration of applications into Facebook. I have sampled the apps in Facebook, but I haven’t seen any real feature improvement of already existent apps such as Wetpaint (the wiki I planned to use) by using it in Facebook.
The only advantages of using Facebook in the course context seem to be, that Facebook does the identity and notification management. I will discuss this in detail later this month with my students and we will try to come up with some ideas how to merge Social Networks, Open Content and (E-)Learning.