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Students report that one of the most common topics of conversation on the social networking scene is education. Almost 60 percent of students who use social networking talk about education topics online and, surprisingly, more than 50 percent talk specifically about schoolwork.

ince then, several applications built on the social network’s developer platform (such as Courses 2.0) have sought to restore the functionality, but none has achieved a significantly wide user base among many campuses.

The university, he said, is finding it can have the benefits of “living within the Facebook world” without ignoring “prudent concern to retain Facebook as a true social networking site.”

With the applications, students will be able to play a “name game” to learn classmates’ names, Staton said — an idea that he suggested would also be useful to faculty members at the beginning of the semester. There would also be a campus news feed, and features that current Facebook users would find familiar, such as the ability to give gifts (like a cup of coffee) to frazzled classmates.

The field test for one of the courses I developed recently finished, and I got the initial feedback today. This is the first course where I have used blogs, wikis, and other tools. A lot of what students do for this course is outside of the LMS, but they also come back in for the discussion boards. One point in the feedback was that students had a hard time jumping back and forth between the blogs and the discussion boards. The conversations didn’t seem connected to each other, and the discussions “didn’t have a home.” It is one of the problems with all of these tools that everything is so scattered. RSS can aggregate a lot of content into one place, but you still have to be able to bounce back and forth between resources and connect it all. Using these tools creates a much less centralized experience than a traditional LMS.