Facebook

I've been spending a lot of time on Facebook recently. I'm confident & comfortable enough there now to admit publicly that I'd steered clear of it for ages because I had it confused with Faceparty, controversial hangout of teens & thrill-seekers with money to spend on its more, um, interesting features.

One big attraction of Facebook for me is the way it lets me combine different real-world networks: my Facebook "Friends" are primarily OU colleagues, but also fellow students & family members. Another appealing feature is the "status updates" where I can post short & trivial comments about what I'm doing right now, & read the same from my friends. I don't always feel like writing a mini-essay for a blog entry, but there's always time for a quick Facebook post.

There's no doubt that Facebook is becoming increasingly pervasive. Just two illustrations, one positive & one negative:

1. A personal anecdote...

I look after several FirstClass forums for (mostly new) OU students. This week, for the first time, one of the new arrivals announced - within hours of the forum opening - that she had created a Facebook group for fellow students on that presentation of her course. She didn't need to explain what Facebook was, & within a day, over 20 members had signed up.

2. Two news stories this week...

Tuesday saw hysterical reports of the 233 million hours a month spent on Facebook & similar social networking sites by UK workers, along with calls for such access to be banned.

Then on Wednesday, we were 'reassured' (ie alarmed) about the risks of loss of privacy & even identity theft associated with Facebook.

I'm not yet convinced of Facebook's potential as a pedagogical (rather than social) aid to learning, but I don't think it's just a fad, & I certainly don't think it marks the End Of Civilisation As We Know It.

Slidecasting

...I'd been thinking it was time to split off my OU/techie blogging from the "What I did on my holidays" stuff. Keeping them apart worked well when I was blogging for H806, but I'd left that behind when the course ended. Then today I watched Martin's slidecast & was intrigued both professionally & personally.

On a professional level, for the reasons I outlined in a comment on Martin's OU blog. Basically, a slidecast strikes me as an ideal compromise between uploading a set of Powerpoint slides after a presentation (if the presenter is any good, the slides alone will fail to capture more than a tiny fraction of what was actually delivered - I often find them frustratingly cryptic)& full-on webcasting, which is heavy on resources, unsuited to desktop PC screens (especially for those of us with less than perfect vision)& more inhibiting for a presenter than simply having their voice recorded. A slidecast is also - as Martin's post demonstrates - great for embedding in other forms of online media.

At a personal level, I was amused by Martin's "rules" for blogging, which included the "I'm not interested in your cat" line. Now, I don't have a cat - I'm not even particularly fond of them - but if I did, Bluefluff would certainly have blogged about it! This reminded me about my vague intentions to Do Something about sorting out my own blogging.

Hence Bluefluff 2.0 - not only Bluefluff's second incarnation, but one that will be (loosely) focused on what are (loosely) referred to as Web 2.0 phenomena, the second generation web. Slidecasting seems as good a place as any to start.