Academic social networking
Overview
This project will develop a social networking for academics and students, integrated with our institutional VLE, offering affordances similar to consumer social networks, but targeted to academic applications, with a focus on enhancing teaching and learning.
Aims and objectives
We aim to deliver a range of social applications which are designed to meet genuine needs in academia, and which have been created using best practice user-centric design methods. We will use rapid iterative development cycles to deliver a number of versions and applications, launching to our campus in summer 2009 as a pilot, and following up with further applications based on user feedback.
Project methodology
CARET will work with Flow Interactive, a user-centric research and design consultancy, to follow best practice for product design with user involvement. We will create personas as design targets, and wil test our prototype systems with real users before finalizing development.
Anticipated outputs and outcomes
This project will deliver a set of social applications designed to enhance teaching and learning, which are integrated into the institiutional VLE and the codebase will be released as open source. We will also report on user requirements for such applications and results of user testing of our developed systems.
Technology / Standards used
We will use the Apache Shindig open source platform as the backbone of our social network system, integrated into our open source Sakai-based VLE. The social applications will be built using OpenSocial, the open API for social networks.
Lead Institution
Project Staff
Project Manager
Project Team
- Anne-Sophie de Baets
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Nicolaas Matthijs
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Tjhien Liao
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