The Course Profiles application for Facebook has been praised in a report by Childnet International and funded by Becta, the UK Government body for learning technology. The report's author, Josie Fraser left a message on the forum for Course Profiles to let us know: "I'm delighted to let you know that Course Profiles has been featured in Childnet's Young People and Social Networking Services report ... thank you for providing such a great example". The report covers the use of social networking services by children and young people in education and coverage of its contents (including a link to the full report) can be found on Josie Fraser's blog.

For some time the same team that brought you Course Profiles has been working on another Facebook application for Open University students and staff and now that application has been released, it is My OU Story. The idea of this application is that it provides a place for people to tell their story related to OU studies. They can (through the preferences page) choose to allow the stories they post to be shared with everybody, people in their network, just their friends or even keep the story to themselves. When you post you story you can also record how you are feeling at the time on a mood slider (which I hope you like as it took ages to get right!). Once a person has submitted a few stories you can see how they are feeling over time by having a look at their mood graph. Being a social application through, the interaction is not just one way. If somebody reads your story they can also provide feedback, maybe to say they are happy for you, or on worse days to "hang on in there".

Something that has become vastly annoying recently about Facebook is the sheer number of invites to add applications to a profile. The invites mechanism used to be a handy way to let your friends know about an application they might like, but unfortunately some application developers decided to abuse this process and force you to invite friends before you could use it. Eventually this lead to a situation where you could log in to your account and find a large number of invites waiting for you, many of them generated by badly behaved applications.

The Course Profiles application, which allows you to display a badge on your profile in Facebook about your Open University studies has just been updated. This is a bit of an interim release while we plan a brand new user interface that will enable users to connect with the application's features more easily. Not that this is some sort of dull maintenance release though, we've put in some new features!

Top educational blogger Stephen Downes has compiled his own list of who he feels should have been Edublog winners, and our very own Course Profiles application in Facebook gets his vote for Best educational use of a social networking service.

Welcome to my first ever blog post! There is a fair chance you are here because you have been reading Prof. Martin Weller's blog post about the new Course profiles application that we have been developing to enable OU students to share with their friends on Facebook. If you haven't read his post then have a look at http://nogoodreason.typepad.co.uk/no_good_reason/2007/10/first-ou-facebo.html. It has been a very interesting experience working on this application and has been very worthwhile as a developer to work in this new environment.

Course Profiles
Details coming soon...