[Air-L] Examples of Successful Uses of Facebook in the Classroom?

[Ted Coopman]

All,

There seems to be a lot of money on the table for a good LMS, it is amazing
everything is either crappy or complicated. Honestly pbworks + secure
gradebook, quizzes, and a discussion board would do it. I would think it
would take Google, Apple, or the like a couple of weeks to come up with
something better!

What really blows my mind is the seeming ignorance about instructional
design or the amount of steps it takes to do anything in either BB or D2L.
Intuitive they are not.

-TED

PS. just for the record, having to hit "reply all" still sucks.

On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 11:30 AM, Rhiannon Bury <rcbury at rogers.com> wrote:

> At Athabasca, an exclusively distance/open university, we use Moodle as our
> primary learning delivery and management platform.  Most of our undergrad
> courses are individualized so I am unable to make use of the chat and
> discussion
> features. However, the blog in Moodle was so poor that I had to change my
> assignment. Moodle, like most open source software, cannot just be used and
> adopted easily without a high level of technical expertise.  We have teams
> of IT
> professionals customizing it before it is ready for student and faculty
> use. In
> the future we expect some kind of integration with elgg, as we have one of
> its
> main developers on faculty with us from the UK.
>
> Rhiannon
>
> Dr. Rhiannon Bury
> Assistant Professor
> Women's and Gender Studies
> Athabasca University (Canada's Open University)
> rbury at athabascau.ca
>
>
>
>
> ________________________________
> From: Ted Coopman <ted.coopman at gmail.com>
> To: Graham Meikle <graham.meikle at stir.ac.uk>
> Cc: "air-l at listserv.aoir.org" <air-l at listserv.aoir.org>
> Sent: Fri, August 13, 2010 10:47:08 AM
> Subject: Re: [Air-L] Examples of Successful Uses of Facebook in the
> Classroom?
>
> All,
>
> We just switched from Blackboard to D2L - both suck in unique ways and are
> (IMO) highly ideological in how they think you should teach and time
> consuming to work with. Of course, my institution's lack of meaningful tech
> support and banker's hours are also issues. I just can't rely on it being
> up
> and functional 24/7.
>
> I have head good things about Moodle, but I can't understand why education
> LMS is so crappy in that 1997 Microsoft kind of way. U of Washington has
> its
> own system that was pretty user friendly which is only great of you work
> there.
>
> As a rule, I use LMS for grades, quizzes, discussion boards (for all online
> classes), and to post copyrighted materials. I use a combination of pbworks
> (edu version is ad free and my University did pop for the enhanced version)
> and Google Groups for the list function (sign-up is on the pbworks page).
> These are reasonable innocuous, easy to use, and dependable.
>
> FB is a good platform for students to use is they choose for research
> projects or to study as media topic, but I find their privacy policies
> problematic enough that I would not force students to use it.
>
> -TED
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-- 
Ted M. Coopman Ph.D.
Lecturer
Department of Communication Studies
Department of Television, Radio, Film, & Theatre
San Jose State University