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.

My OU Story

Details coming soon. 

I was surprised today while on Facebook to notice an advert on the left of the page with the face of a friend of mine promoting a certain local radio station. It looks like this may be due to the SocialAds system in Facebook, which seems to be a way to persuade people to but products on the basis that their friends are a fan of it so you should too. Unlike celebrities though, your apparent endorsement of a product won't earn you a penny, in fact you may not even be aware that this is happening. The products concerned don't seem to be completely random but may be products that you are a "fan" of.

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!

I can hear the thuds on the floor as the "I just don't get it" brigade become overloaded by Facebook's announcement that it is extending the ways in which applications can integrate with their mobile platform. They are even opening up methods for sending SMSs. Facebook has been a runaway success as has text messaging. Up to now if you write an application for Facebook you lose members of your audience when they.. well, go out. Now you can interact with them wherever they are.

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...