Facebook To Open Source Facebook Platform

[Terence Armentano]

TechCrunch, a reputable technology blog, reports that "Sometime soon, perhaps this week, Facebook will turn the year-old Facebook Platform into an open source project, multiple sources have told us. The immediate effect will be to allow any social network to become Facebook Platform compatible - meaning application developers can easily take their Facebook applications and have them run on those social networks, too.

This poses some interesting scenarios for Colleges and Universities that would like to leverage the facebook platform in the educational environment. It will be interesting to see how this differs from other social network scenarios such as google's OpenSocial, the clone-able Ning system (which I also use to run my online teaching community), and the fully open source Elgg system. Which of these will be most useful in the education environment. They each function differently and are offered in different ways to the consumer. What do others think?

[Terence Armentano]

Hey Mary, that is interesting. I'm surprised they don't support open source applications considering many of their web server software is probably open source (ie. linux). I'm pretty excited about our new blogging, website, and podcasting system we have BGSU. I've been working on it's development for about 2 years and we deployed it this past fall. It has been wildly successful in it's short life so far and I am actually presenting on it at the LLT Conference. In essence the system runs on Wordpress and is a personal publishing platform to support the community's social, professional and learning activities. You can check it out at https://blogs.bgsu.edu. We are also looking at a model for providing support for other institutions that want to implement it.

Terence

[Mary Hricko]

well, I'm teaching all of my online courses in NIng right now and my students love the platform. Facebook was too weird--even with its course apps --there were all sorts of problems with it and it really (to be honest) wasn't a good classroom experience. I really hated the layout, but I liked how you could create separate accounts as the prof etc.

I also didn't like that they had a habit of taking down sites--they took down an Ursuline College site because they claimed the terms weren't being followed--I'd be pretty miffed if all my content suddenly vanished because the facebook group thought I violated their terms--elgg is cool but there's the learning curve--I prefer open source, but our university won't support it and so for FERPA--if something goes wrong--guess what?

I was able to get FERPA clearance for ning (why elgg would be different--I don't know). I think the bigger probelm is getting our admins to let us use these tools rather than the university approved CMS. Ning offers great tech support.

I don't think I'll ever go back to our cms again--there's just so much more flexibility in these apps for teaching.