http://bgnews.com/campus/facebook-in-the-classroom/

http://www.bgsu.edu/offices/mc/zoomnews/page85433.html

As a Learning Management System the Facebook group enabled important educational exchanges, but there are a few additional features that could make this platform even more useful. The ability to see all contributions made to the group by a single person would enable a teacher to view all comments, links, pictures, videos and even “Like” buttons used by a student within the group page.  This would enable an instructor to easily track and measure student engagement. Adding the ability to make separate photo albums would enable an instructor to differentiate contributions posted from different classes. If Facebook groups also had the ability to add applications, a teacher could feed information from other sources, via RSS or SMS, directly into the group page. Finally, if Facebook had the ability to host document and slideshows, there would be no reason to use Google Documents or another document hosting service – students could read documents or view lecture slides without leaving the group page.

http://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-in-education/using-a-facebook-group-as-a-learning-management-system/10150244221815570

Jane McGonigal’s talk on gaming in the real world is totally worth the watch and I thank AJ Kelton for passing it on to me! I think what she outlines as gamer skills to be utilized the real world can ABSOLUTLEY be used to construct divergent assignments in an integrative classroom. Although, I totally disagree with Malcom Gladwell‘s theory in Outliers: that 10000 hours of practice at something = you’re an expert at it. Give me two hours on FarmVille; (something I’ve never played) and Google and I’ll can be an expert too.

Help me out here… add to this open google doc:

Bonus Points: Give students the Google 20 = 20% of class time to work on their own project! Not something you assign, something they come up with themselves and can turn in for credit. Let them write their own assignment.

I think many people were disappointed last week when the 100k invites for Google Wave went out and everyone realized… Google Wave isn’t what they think it is. The consensus: Wave is a glorified (or confusing) email/chat system that has its own protocol for creating collaborative documents. Woo hoo.

What were we expecting Google Wave to be? I think most people expected a system that would merge email, chat (IM & SMS), with the communication of Facebook and Twitter streams (links, video, pics, and more). An all-in-one protocol for messaging perhaps?

Why it’s needed:
A number of APIs allow us to send SMS Tweets that update our Facebook feed. We can send an IM to update Twitter. We can email a picture to Flickr which updates our FriendFeed and perhaps that posts back to Twitter or Facebook. Right now these services and connections are spread out over a number of sites (and frankly, it’s very hard to keep track of what is updating where and when I do what?).

What Wave and its ‘bots’ (or programmable plug-ins that deal with Waves) could/should be is… an organizational tool for all the many forms of communication we use to interact with other people on a daily basis. Google seems to be the business ready for this, with products like Gmail, Gtalk, Google Voice, and the power of Google search. Facebook, according to CEO Zuckerberg, would love to be the number one form of communication on the planet. The first to sort out the mess that is 101 million ways of interacting and communicating, will win. It’s that simple.

How it should work:
An interactive all-in-one communication tool should:

• Be open and extensible
  • Any communication format can be sent to/from email, to IM or SMS, into World of Warcraft or Second Life (any game or site w/ chat), or translated into Japenese and sent as Voicemail, etc.
  • With my permission, any bot should be able to access certain Waves and make this happen. Right now, we grant these permissions through APIs for various sites/tools we use.
• Have algorithmic privacy controls
  • A public Wave about my recent surgery is automatically sent to only my family, close friends, and doctors. However, a Wave to my doctor is private. A link to melanoma goes to anyone interested in health (or at risk!).
• Be interoperable
  • A friend’s Wave about an NFL player comes to me because I am have that player on my Yahoo! Fantasy Football team. Another friend’s Wave about a player I am not interested in, does not come to me.
• Be verifiable
  • I should know who is communicating with me. A system that verifies identity on (at least) 3 platforms is needed to reduce spam and allow for more productive communication.

What it could do:
Besides allowing for Google, Facebook, and Twitter to use this new messaging protocol and still compete for your eyeballs on their brand/version of this one-stop-shop for communication, a system like this could be used for bigger and better things. First, I would assume that whatever system was created for this would have a mobile app on many phones, or at the very least be able to convert anything to SMS. Second, I would assume that this would be the protocol adopted and used for all communications systems: phone calls, emails, IM, chat, status updates (even collaborative docs). Again, this would allow all platforms to fight competitively about branding and front end design while still allowing users to ‘do more’ with their communications.

Now let’s say I am playing World of Warcraft and my wife is at the store. With the touch of a button I can send a /tell that will arrive as a text message on her phone. “Buy some milk”.

Someone could write a bot that would poll (Wave already has a polling bot) all Ohioans about the upcoming Issue to legalize gambling or even Obama’s healthchare plan. All verified user data could then be sent to my local representative or Senator. Talk about a powerful lobby for the people.

Add geographical locations in the mix and a 911 call about a man choking might send an SMS to a nearby doctor/paramedic and save someone’s life. “You are a registered paramedic. A man in a brown coat is choking at the restaurant next door. Can you assist?”

Two new sites launched this week taking that “conversational” approach to the next level using Twitter. Camtweet and Twitcam. Read more here.

The Justin.tv app Camtweet requires invites to participate in early testing, has a really ugly UI, and when has a chat room viewers sign into with thier Twitter ID/Password. When someone Tweets from your page, it includes a link to your show. Good idea! The rest of the site lacks any other bells or whistles.

TwitCam is powered by LiveStream (formerly Mogulus.com, I talked about in the Live Broadcasting 2.0 post) and works about the same. Log in with your Twitter cred, links and more… Plus a very pretty UI. I’m surprised however that LiveStream does not supply users with more tools or features that are in the full LiveStream accounts. For instance, the ability to play YouTube videos or show a ticker at the bottom of your screen (regular features on LiveStream). I am guessing that LiveStream is just trying to get users to broadcast first, but pulling in Twitter users and will move forward from there.

If there’s one think I’m surprised about… it’s that the TwitCam name isn’t already owned by King TWIT (This Week In Tech) Leo Laporte.

http://bgsu.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=41501853292&ref=ts

This application allows Facebook users to quickly read thru the top 10 Headlines of many BGSU RSS feeds, including blogs from blogs.bgsu.edu and Campus Update.

Earlier today I was invited to join the network. I accepted the invite and decided to make a profile and check it out. During the set up it said it would look though my gmail address book and see who else was on Quechup. After it got done thinking, there were four check boxes. It said “would you like to be friends with these people”. Since they were already on Quechup, I clicked yes.

Apparently when I clicked yes, Quechup sent emails to EVERYONE ELSE in my address book inviting them to be my friend on the Quechup site. (For more of my personal reactions to this incident, check out my personal blog at www. anthonyfontana .vox.com). This is a familiar process for those who use facebook. However, without one additional page asking if I’d like to invite everyone by email.

This incident (and of course, a PAID networking site) got me thinking about the amount of trust we put into social networking sites. It may have said somewhere on that page “would you also like us to spam everyone in your address book with an invite to our site?” But my intuitive reaction was to click yes, invite the four friends you have checked. There was a level of trust there, built by similar interfaces on other sites, that Quechup took advantage of.

Now comes the kicker. During my profile setup, it asked me questions about height, eye color, as well as whether or not I live with my children. However, when I tried to enter simple information in the text box, things like “I’m an educator,” or “I use Second Life”, an error message appeared informing me NOT to put that sort of info on their site due to “identity theft on social networking sites.” It then gave me the same error message when I tried to enter such things as “art, movies, and music” as interests.

Here, Quechup is trying to build a false level of trust by insisting that they are protecting me, meanwhile collecting a lot more information than other social networking sites have. Was I willing to give up the info… sure. Will I now? I don’t think so.

How can we establish trust with websites that promote trust in relationships? What role does intuitive interface play in our expectations of service? What happens to our trust when these expectations are not met or even worse broken?