Supporting teaching and learning with the best bits of social networking
Social networking is a growing phenomena with a wide range of sites offering different features to connect people to each other; from Facebook, MySpace, and Bebo, to LinkedIn and Academia.edu. At CARET, we’re stepping back from these commercial products. We see that social applications can offer powerful, compelling features to students and staff in higher education, and hope to enhance the existing real world networks that make the University of Cambridge experience so valuable. (Click here for more information and other projects in this area at CARET).
This project is using user-centric design methods to build a range of social applications for CamTools. Our early explorations to find out how social applications can enhance and support teaching and learning helped us understand that there can be a big overlap with research activity too. We undertook user research with undergraduates, postgraduates and staff at the University to investigate how they communicate and connect with each other today, and synthesised this into design ideas, with help from real user testing, during Spring 2009.We’ve discovered that events, and the social or people-oriented information around them, are important to staff and students alike. We’re now working on new design ideas and developing software within Sakai to implement these.
Early applications will be integrated into next generation CamTools, with further applications following later on. All the software created as part of this project will be released under a community open source licence as part of Sakai.
Did you know? Over 41% of undergraduates at the University of Cambridge use Facebook several times a day.
Get involved!
Email Dr. Laura James (laura@caret.cam.ac.uk) if you are part of the University of Cambridge and would like to take part in our research and testing!
If you work for another university using Sakai, and are interested in feeding information about your users into the social networking features of Sakai, contact Anne-Sophie de Baets (asd38@caret.cam.ac.uk) or Dr. Laura James (laura@caret.cam.ac.uk) and we can help you get started with user research at your institution, and let you know how you can feed your user research findings into our design process.
