Writing about - http://contenthere.blogspot.com/2007/11/facebook-as-your-intranet.html
My colleagues Stuart Brown and Jed Cawthorne have pointed me in the direction of this post, and it certainly chimes with some of the amorphous and ongoing debate going on here.
There’s a lot of tinkering going on using Facebook and a variety of other Web 2.0 tools - but as yet only a nascent framework for how it all pulls together.
The benefits of some of the individual projects are clear - for example a “What OU courses have I done/am I doing?” application for Facebook could help students to support each other peer-to-peer within a cohort who may never meet face to face. The argument for students is an easy one though. And besides which, in the context of this job outside my remit.
Looking at how it relates to staff is another matter. You could argue the same benefits with a dispersed workforce: 40o0ish people nominally based in Milton Keynes, 7000 Associate Lecturers (our terminology for tutors) across the country and substancially more still in the 13 Regional Centres. But then that comes down to having the right applications to achieve the right things.
Which is where you run slap bang into the argument about using official data (to fuel such applications) outside the Firewall and on a service run by a third party provider….
The bit that intrigues me generally though, is the profile system - this links into my trombinoscope/staff directory thinking which is as applicable here at the OU as it was at Warwick. This is where I think the real gold is in the way that Facebook works. But it’s still only the principle, rather than the specific tool, that interests me.
So, potentially over to Stuart and his CIPR Diploma Project, to investigate..
Another thought: how long will it be until Facebook starts licensing closed versions to organisations in a similar way to Google and Multimap? Is it worth building an all-singing all-dancing staff directory that works on the same principles as Facebook if there’s a possiblility of using the tool itself?
Finally, a work version would avoid the issue of determining the varied permissions on your embarrassing party photos!
2 Comments
November 16, 2007 at 11:21 pm
Hi Casey,
There’s some JISC-funded research going on into how social networking sites and educational information systems could interact - Mark van Harmelen is your man in that context.
I’m currently spinning up my own JISC project on (essentially) personalisation of information services based on institutional data, and I’m going to be looking in some detail at the issues surrounding the sharing of student and staff data, both from a social/personal perspective and from a technological perspective.
Most of the people who’ve been involved in such work in the past have been coming at it from an academic/pedagogic perspective - I think it would be rather interesting to look at the admin/professional perspective. If you’re interested, drop me an email.
Cheers,
Max
November 20, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Dear Casey,
It was fascinating to read about your blog and the interesting highlights. Well since you are a vetran in the field of Communication and i am still a novie i would need some guidance from your side. I am working as a asst manager corp communication in an MNC in India. I am in the middle of preparing a PPT stressing on the importance of internal communication and letting the employees know that why and how IC is critical for the success of the organisation and the employess. Can u give me some tips on the same.Cheers Amit
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