Reviewing the OpenLearn tools
Firstly, a slightly belated Happy New Year!
Yesterday we had an interesting discussion about how we could evaluate and review the social tools included in OpenLearn, namely, the Knowledge Mapping (with Compendium & Cohere), MSG and Flashmeeting. Our feeling is that they’ve not been as successful as we first hoped, and there maybe lots of different reasons for this. For MSG I’ve detailed some of the possible reasons in a JIME paper that will be published soon.
It’s quite interesting to compare how OpenLearn is viewed externally to the OU vs how it’s seen internally (and within the OpenLearn team). The feedback we have from external users is that, to paraphrase, “OpenLearn is great, I can get free OU content”, whereas I’m slightly dissappointed that MSG isn’t used more than it is. I guess the difference is due to the fact that users may see the site as a way of getting content, and not necessarily somewhere they can come to to gain access to tools, such as IM, video-conferencing etc.
Well I’m doing my best. But when you consider how little everyone internally (is seen to be) uses the tools to communicate you really can’t blame the outside world for not “getting” just how influential msg, et al could be.
I thought you might like this conversation from last year. It pretty well sums up your position.
http://forum.skype.com/index.php?showtopic=60793
Great product and potential content managers are having a play, but can you find a product manager who will actually use what they’re selling?
BTW. You may be interested in this conversation http://labspace.open.ac.uk/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=275 (and maybe some others in the tools forum)
I can’t see why you’d want to waste time detailing, in a journal, why the pick up hasn’t occurred yet, when you haven’t even done ANY marketing. Why don’t yo get the marketing or media producing academics off their bums?
If that glossary highlight tool is yours, fantastic! But I’m afraid, after checking out the OpenID get together, as a content producer, the computer says no.
Lastly, cause i couldn’t bothered making an entry above, did you check out the comments to that yahoo/id story? I do hope you and Tony, etc will talk them through, cause if we don’t have an OCWC ID (or OU ID consortia) provider, I’m going to have to register with yahoo and show you how easy it will be to spam.