The http://www.JomSocial.com tools are giving us a nice springboard into easy p2p interaction. Trialling aiming to start in Sept after we’ve kicked the tyres a bit more: I have your invites in gilt-edged envelopes in front of me ;-)

We already have a baby recommender gadget runnning in Cloudworks [eg. http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloud/view/2994, and we're now working with the new JICSC-funded KMi/Library/Arts Lucero project around linked data to start experimenting with analytics and recommenders in RDF space [http://lucero-project.info].

Agreed that there may well not be much in your other SN profiles that will really inform your learning/inquiry-focused interests, so you will prob want to enhance your SL profile to give the engine as much to work with as poss.

Simon

As to flow, I was assuming that would be based on activity data within the SocialLearn environment, though I suspect it would be easy enough to syndicate updates from other services (yet more duplicate channels!;-)

Thanks for spreading the news. In answer to your queries:

1. There aren’t any plans for OpenLearn to replicate the news pages on the OU website but we will be creating content relating to newsworthy teaching and research related subjects – more the science behind the story than covering the story itself. We meet wekly with the Media Relations office to make the links.

2. It’s likely that Stadium content will appear on YouTube in the first instance and be embedded in OpenLearn with more wraparound content where we have it. We’ve done a bit of this in the past so yes, many of these lectures could appear in What’s On in the future (rights allowing).

3. There are loads of feeds available in the site albeit very hidden away. We’re running our second stage of expert testing now and more user testing in the Autumn so will raise the prominence as an issue – I can see that it would be useful to at least raise the category level feeds up to the top of the category pages. In the meantime, scroll down to the bottom of any article page and you should see a set of three tabs. One is called Article feeds.

Thanks for feedback.

Laura

One of the key deficits of the original SocialLearn platform was how difficult the “social” aspect was in practice. I’m immensely curious about how this has been addressed this time, since it says you can connect with others and discuss your ideas with others on SocialLearn when your questions can’t be answered by a search engine. How do you do this? I saw widgets for People Recommendations and “Flow”, but I wasn’t sure where this content was drawn from.

It seems likely that “People” recommendations are based on the profiles people set up (or import) on the site. What kind of info would you import from Facebook that would be related to your learning interests or needs or do you end up with recommendations for people who work at the same place or go to the same school? Twitter’s even shorter! The LinkedIn one, I could see being more useful.

I remember, on the basis of the presentation at the OU Conference this year, tweeting that “SocialLearn provides the ‘glue’ to connect activities, friends & recommendations. SocialLearn is a layer to connect you.” That suggests that it’s more of an aggregator for content hosted/managed elsewhere than a provider itself. Is that the case for asking questions? How do you ask questions and follow discussions about your questions?

So many questions and so few answers yet. It’s all part of a trick to suck me into trying it out. It’s working!