Jun 9 2007
NING Project drawing to a close…
Well I am now bringing together a variety of results and observations from the use of NING to produce the French Connection Social Network. It is interesting how other students not even linked with the project are now asking for invitations. However to some extent the conversation has died which is to be expected with a niche social network that is not being led by anyone – and so the initial premise of its use has not been fulfilled.
It is interesting the spread of Facebook, to almost total domination within the school and
has led me to wonder whether trying to use another network or ‘yet another network’ would in a longer term be doomed to failure as students obviously gravitate to the network that has most friends within it. Although maybe if different schools had been involved the ‘pull’ characteristics of the FC Network might have been more. It also must be clarified that through the initial questionnaire 24% of students are not a member of any social network. And so my reliance on the students knowledge of social networks and how they work, might have been a little too much of a jump for some students. It was notable that a great deal suggested the site was too complicated, and most only used the most basic of features.
The students from the initial questionnaire really did seem to be interested in combining the two. That is a ‘fun’ social network and an academic /educational element to this. There are many recent articles discussing this idea especially with the ubiquitous Facebook, including the recent blog post suggesting:- ‘Facebook: A ‘School’ in the future? In reality though through observation many students could not see the educational value of conversing in French? Maybe this was down to the way the Social Network was presented by myself and probably more so by the MFL teachers as a bit of fun. When actually if objectives and aims had been set, the conversation could have been directed further into ways in which it was transparently useful to the students.
Next post will feature my usual mad mind-map with references….and some more thoughts and conclusions especially about the ‘small pieces loosely joined’ debate and how I think the FC network was beginning to do this well.
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