iterativelearning

A while back, I blogged about a company (Inigral) that was looking to position Facebook as a complement to traditional LMSs rather than as a replacement.

Now, Jeffrey Young over at the CHE Tech blog is reporting on projects that look to integrate platforms like FB with emergency response notification systems for college campuses. One project underway is over at the University of Maryland and is being headed up by HCI visionaries, Ben Shneiderman (Designing the User Interface) and Jenny Preece (Interaction Design; Beyond HCI). Young does a nice job of including those with concerns about how such a system might be abused (e.g., false alarms) as well as those touting its advantages, but the detail that stood out most to me was the description of a former New Orleans resident (now a student at UCLA), who explained that when Katrina hit, she was going to social networking arenas like Facebook for information because the cellphone networks were useless.

Guest e-Literate blogger Michael Statton describes a project in which Facebook is designed to complement rather than compete with the traditional LMS. Developed by Inigral, it offers a “private, secure application on Facebook.” The attention to privacy could nicely address the lingering dilemma of mixing purely social groups with purely academic — domains that perhaps a significant group of students and faculty would prefer to keep separate. He also explains that schools can integrate whatever branding strategy they have by doing things like designing unique skins. It seems to me that this might have some good potential to expand since it moves adoption of instructional software beyond confining binaries.