Yesterday we posted a story asking for feedback on how you would improve OEN. Unfortunately, we haven’t received any comments. We hope that the lack of response is because you are busy reading the stories we post. Here at OEN we have a few ideas for changes. One change might be adding Twitter, Buzz and Delicious badges, similar to what is done at Mashable.
We have a Twitter account with a respectable 522 followers and part of 43 lists. Should OEN participate on other social networks (Facebook, Orkut)?
We know that there are many online communities that you participate in, but we would really appreciate any feedback you have, whether it is about our social networking efforts or not. Thank you very much for reading OEN.
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I did read the call for feedback previously, but don’t really know what to suggest. Hopefully other readers will pitch in with ideas. I visit OEN daily or almost daily. Specifically heads up on open resources/textbooks interest me. I personally don’t use twitter and social networking sites like facebook which means I am in the minority of net users. However, I can definitely see that embracing these outlets by OEN could help reach out to new users as well as give another format for current users. For me, visiting OEN website and giving a quick scan of the posts works fine, but given the number of people using facebook etc., it may well be useful for OEN to go that route.
I greatly appreciate what the OEN does; I don’t have to subscribe to the myriad blogs whose posts aren’t always OE-related.
Several things stick out in my mind that would make my experience with OEN better.
- Firstly, could you write some articles about the current state of OER projects/companies? There are a lot of projects but their scope and overlap differs greatly. Having quickly become the central hub for all things open education, this site is in a perfect position to report on the industry.
- Along the same lines, perhaps a monthly recap of changes/announcements?
- Could the Google Books settlement posts be separated into a separate RSS feed? Perhaps several separate feeds for the different categories (Google Books, Open Access, OER, OCW, Projects/Companies)
- One which was already brought was the lack of commenting directly on this site. I’m unsure how you could facilitate this, but it would be nice if there were greater community involvement.
Thanks to both of you for your comments. Tom, you raise some good points. Let me address them in order:
1) Current state of OER projects/companies? I think this is a good idea, though the frequency of these posts might be 1 or 2 a month.
2) Recap of monthly changes/announcements? This is absolutely doable. We’ll look into it.
3) Separate RSS feeds? We do have tagging, but I understand that it isn’t enough. I’ve tried to back off on the frequency of Google Book Settlement News, but I know some people don’t particularly care unless there’s a huge development. I could probably work something out via Yahoo! Pipes. Maybe there’s a WordPress plugin we could use on our end to give you the option?
4) Lack of commenting? OEN definitely wishes there was more commenting. I know many blogs struggle to get comments (Alan Levine had a post along these lines). There are two issues I see 1) the posts are pretty rapid (about 5 a day), and 2) OEN for many people is a way station on to other links. I’ll have to think about it more.