Social:Learn, SocialLearn and SociaLearn
alex June 10th, 2008
The OU SocialLearn project has been running a little ‘behind the scenes’ for the last few months and I’ve kept broadly up to date with what’s going on, but I’ve not been deeply involved (and OK, I’m still not sure what variation of the words ’social’ and ‘learn’ make up the proper project title). Rather than me explaining it all here, Martin has posted an overview.
The SocialLearn API is now available (though I don’t think it’s public yet), so I had a catch up with my colleagues Liam and Nick, who have each been building applications using the API. Liam’s work has been on ‘Microlearner’ which links up Twitter to the SocialLearn API, so you can post learning goals to Twitter and they’ll magically be available in your SocialLearn profile. 2Learner is Nicks application, which allows you to search for resources.
From chatting to Liam and Nick it seems there’s still a way to go with the API (unsurprising as it’s a work in progress), for example, there’s currently no way to relate a resource to a learning goals, but I think this may change in the future.
The API has much in common with the Facebook API, in that there is a core set of functions and associated data on the SocialLearn server, then any applications can build upon these, but these applications are siloed, (i.e. applications can’t share any other data than that available through the API). While this might be fine for Facebook, and is entirely appropriate for that (especially with all the privacy issues involved), I’m not sure if this approach may restrict the range of applications that may be developed with the API - I’m assuming throwing buns and being bitten by vampires are not top priorities for SocialLearn.
We had a think about how we can get Cohere talking to the SocialLearn API, and what makes sense as a demonstration using the 2 existing applications. What we came up with was the ability to import your learning goals into Cohere, and then be able to organise then in a more structured way, but additionally to allow you to push out any ideas you enter into Cohere as goals in SocialLearn. Each of these will be fairly trivial to do, albeit in a not very clever way… so best get on with it ready to demo next week.
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