Social Networking sites always present a problem for Colleges: Students love them, Staff are worried about the inherent child protection and student management issues.

Our students have often commented on our Forums that they wanted access to Twitter, Facebook etc for a myriad of reasons, offically Social Networking sites are banned under our internet rules, however that has not stopped our students discussing the issues at length:

Quotes from the forums:

"I'm doing an assignment on Digital Communications for my Publishing Course, which includes an essay on communication through social networking and IM, I can understand why Myspace and Facebook and the IM clients would be made unavailable but I also need to make a blog for my course to showcase my images from Photography. Twitter is the application I am hoping to review in fuller detail for my assignment for Digital Communication as it has marketing elements as well which I think is vital to the Publishing areas."

"It's also good for finding help, promoting and learning from what others are doing especially if you surround yourself with friends who are in to the same field as you. It's great for me to twitter with web developers for example."

The level of discussion on Forums (currently over eighty posts on the subject) indicates a need that is not being addressed by C Space, but for child protection reasons we can't give unmetered access to Social Networking sites. An impasse has been reached if you will, Students want to be able to access whatever content they wish, whenever they want and Staff wish to ensure that Student work in a safe enviroment, free of distractions.

So what is seeK?

I'm currently developing a application named seeK, which aims gives students the ability to add status updates and add friends within the secure confines of the College network. My aim is to not just answer the needs of the Students but to provide Teaching Staff with the ability to message their Students with updates e.g. a teacher could post an update informing students that an assignment is due in or share a link that might be valuable to coursework, or inform them that the class has changed location etc. Access to this application will be controlled by Staff, enabling Lecturers to switch off access at will, ensuring that the system will not be abused. The application will also make use of Forum avatars to combine both applications under the Teaching and Learning Banner.

This application is part of a number of web controls that I am currently working on that will form the latest section of C Space called seeSpace.

Questions, Questions, Questions

Can a middle ground be reached? If so what format should a solution take? Do we want a full blown Facebook? Or perhaps should we emulate the short, snappy twitter, should we? can we? which is best?

Social Networking sites, love them or hate them, they will (in one form or another) be here for quite some time. There are a number of blogs and analytics sites dedicated to monitoring the userbase of various Social Networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, Myspace etc.)

As you can see from the above chart Facebook had over one billion unique visits in January this year, this is all the more impressive when you consider it has been five years since its creation. Regardless of the name or type of site, the concept of peer to peer communication via Social Networking sites is here to stay, however which format will be the overall winner?

Two factions, Only one winner?

As Social Networking is evolves, two distinct trends are forming: Facebook style websites that provide a rich content experience and Twitter style short burst communications. Both are classed as social networking sites and are often mentioned in the same sentance when refering to the concept, however their approach and execution could not be more different. Facebook has grown from its friend image sharing roots to a fully featured development platform , providing thousands of different application to users. Twitter is what I call the SMS of the internet; in that like text messaging it does not require a powerful device to run, its simple to use and most of all, its very fast. The most popular twitter user (based on followers and time of writing) is currently CNN Breaking news, with over 820,000 followers meaning that with one update CNN is able to inform close to a million people in mere seconds.

So which is best? It's a hard question to answer, it depends on what you to achieve, if you're looking for a fully featured application that will enable you to share learning information from a institution branded platform, Facebook will enable you to do this and more. However if you are looking to share course updates with your students or wanting students to discuss topics whilst not necessarily being in the same location, a twitter style application may be more suitable.

Universities and Social Networking:

A number of Universities have begun investigations into the learning potiential of Social Networking sites, below are some snippets of what they are doing:

University of Leicester

Can online networking sites help new students settle into university? Can online networking sites, such as Facebook and MySpace, help new students settle into university social and academic life and minimise the chance of them withdrawing from their courses? Researchers at the University of Leicester are now looking for first-year University of Leicester students who use Facebook to help their pioneering research into this issue.

Facebook and Education

London School of Economics and Political Science

This case study explores the use of the social networking site Facebook (www.facebook.com) as a tool for libraries and librarians. The case study was launched some way into the project following the growth and popularity of this social networking site. Many librarians have now joined Facebook for purely social reasons, however it can overlap into the professional world as it is being used by several professional library groups and for promoting library related events. Facebook also has a number of library related tools which the project team felt were worthy of further exploration.

LSE report on Facebook

What next?

seeK is the first in a series of applications that will allow for a fully personalised C Space, I've named this project seeSpace, seeSpace will provide students with a range of web controls to enhance their use of C Space and allow C Space to better match incoming learners expectation of what functionality a intranet should provide.

Feedback, Comments? Contact me