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.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with him, he is described in his Wikipedia entry as "a leading voice in the areas of learning objects and metadata as well as the emerging fields of weblogs in education and content syndication", a very influential voice in the world of Web2.0 education".
The application now has over 2600 users, a fair chunk of the OU network on Facebook and we are now working on the next version which will feature many more features.
Amongst these features will be the capability to add qualifications as well as courses, so you will be able to show what you are working towards. We're also working on a course recommendation engine that will give a "people who studied this course also studied.." view (Tony Hirst has been looking into techniques for content recommendation). Also in the pipeline are a set of changes that are the result of user feedback. The most noticeable difference will be a redesigned user interface which is intended to make it easier for people to get the most from the application. More details will appear here soon.
User feedback has played a crucial role in getting the application to where it is today. All applications in Facebook come with a discussion area where we have been able to work out problems and receive suggestions for features in public. This has been a great asset as it has helped us greatly in developing the application and hopefully we are giving people something that they will find genuinely useful. Sometimes we developers are hidden away from users receiving only second hand reports of any problems, we sometimes don't get a sense of what the users are experiencing and sometimes users don't know how we are trying to address problems. We have taken a different approach with this application, one with direct contact, and it has been very rewarding. We've also used a very different development process from the traditional approach, there is no requirements document here, but instead constant discussion and a discovery of what we want to achieve.
I'll be blogging more about the application and the development process behind it during the next couple of months.
Read more at:
Half an Hour: Not the Edublog Award Winners
Stuart Brown's blog post on the Not the Edublog award
Martin Weller - Not an Eddie, but a Downesy Will do
My del.icio.us tag for Course Profiles
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