Students these days…

I went to a session today on ‘Student blogging: assessing the new texts’, given by The University of Edinburgh’s Hamish Macleod. In his talk, Hamish covered the MSc e-Learning course, which requires continual blogging (supported by Elgg) and is delivered online to over 100 students. As Facebook was mentioned more than once during Hamish’s presentation I asked him what role this played in the course. He said that the students were “encouraged to use Facebook“, although “many already were”. This voluntary take-up of (educational) social software is interesting; while I was completing the same course at a different institution less than three years ago, Facebook – then called ‘Thefacebook‘ – was only just going through the launching of a US college-only service. It is interesting to see that students were one step ahead in the case of this course and inspiring that they were encouraged to use such social software in an educational setting. With no physical presence, one cannot underestimate the effect of online social interactions.

Of course, one would possibly associate distance learning with The Open University, and it is perhaps not surprising to learn that there is an official OU page in Facebook, with accompanying applications here and here. In fact, the OU’s ‘/use’ page shows just how widely the organisation’s online presence is developing. It weren’t like this when I were a lad!