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

Rhiannon Bury rcbury at rogers.com
Mon Aug 16 11:30:55 PDT 2010


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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