Exploiting the Potential of Blogs and Social Networks was organised by UKOLN. It was less focused on teaching and learning than many events I attend and attracted a wide variety of delegates including IT Managers, Web Editors, Lecturers, University Administrators as well as Learning Technologists.

Control

A recurring theme was the contrast made by Melissa Highton between the unrestricted nature of web 2.0 (a choice of services, user-created content and tags) and HE’s tendency to want to control.

In the first presentation, Stephen Clarke, from the University of Birmingham suggested that the best place for any course-based learning activity involving blogging is a Managed Learning Environment, such as Blackboard (WebCT) Vista. The argument being that this was necessary to have some control; for example to be able to archive the content or deal with inappropriate behaviour. While I can see the advantage of offering an institutional system if the blogging is to be assessed I’m not sure an MLE/VLE is necessarily the best tool for the job when it comes to blogging. In my experience VLE blogs aren’t blogs – they lack functionality, they don’t look good and more importantly they aren’t fully connected to blogosphere which is a lot of what blogging is about… linking and being linked to… commenting and being commented on.

Melissa Highton talked about the University of Leeds’ Staff blogs: Leedsfeeds which is based on the open source elgg software. They were keen to host these blogs themselves, not necessarily from a standpoint of control but on the basis that Leeds bloggers are part of the university and their quality blogging should appear under the Leeds banner (if staff wanted it to). This follows the approach of Warwick Blogs where personal university-hosted blogs are available to all staff and students who want them. Melissa suggested that blogging could enhance both learning and research but she is particularly keen on elgg’s community focus and how that works at Leeds.

Whose facebook is it?

The other main topic of the day was if and how universities should make use of social networks and whether, if we do, are we somehow encroaching on the students’ territory?! My feeling before attending this event – based on anecdotes and articles I can’t find (or imagined!) – was that on the whole students didn’t want staff ‘invading their space’. Speakers at this event suggested it’s not so clear cut. Alison Wildish reported that lecturers at Edge Hill receive friend requests from students and thinking about it I know this has happened here too. At Edge Hill they see Facebook as another useful communication channel to students and are developing a Facebook application with this in mind. Tom Milburn from Bath University provided a student’s perspective and demonstrated how facebook is used by Bath students for both peer support and for gathering feedback from students for student-staff liaison committees.

Privacy & Security

This was the other hot topic of the day. Stuart Lee, Oxford University explained how the Oxford Facebook Snooping Scandal (my title) had at least alerted students to how open Facebook can be if you ignore your privacy settings. David Harrison from Cardiff University stressed the need for educating students and suggested that providing guidance was more important than trying to control students’ social networking. He introduced Cardiff’s Stay Safe Online page.

Edge Hills’s Student Portal

Finally a special mention for Edge Hill’s excellent looking student portal. A nice clean design with everything you’d expect: library catelogue, staff directory, email, VLE, Campus News but also plenty of Web 2.o stuff for the kids: YouTube, Del.icio.us & Flickr feeds for ‘edgehill’ tags and an Edge Hill blogs feed. (Click the image for a better look).

There are Slideshares for all the presentations linked from the event timetable