MyLearning Essentials for Facebook
I'll make a longer posting about my views about the future of VLEs, personal learning environments, social networking etc in the future, as it's a fascinating area, but in the meantime though here is little practical contribution to the debate - MyNewport - MyLearningEssentials for Facebook (beta 1...)
You can install it here:
http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2578186469
... and you can view it here:
http://apps.facebook.com/mynewport/
It's essentially a cut down version of MyLearning Essentials (our VLE application) as a Facebook application. Anyone can see the news and blogs, but only our students can get to the course material at the moment.
It's obviously very much under development (not very feature rich, but perfectly usable). If people like the idea we'll work on the look, and also add features (eg would you like to be able to click on your course and see all your fellow students facebook profiles?)
The reason I think this is an important step is this - can we really expect students to want to keep coming to the portal/VLE we provide? I love Last.FM, but I don't want to keep going to the Last.FM site, and I don't need to, because it provides a widget for my blog, a Facebook applications and a client application (iScrobbler).
I'm not claiming this modest application is the answer to the future of VLEs, but hopefully it will prove useful for some people, and provide food for thought.
(A little technical note - it's actually two applications, news and courses - this means if you wanted to you could just take the bits you want - the starting point of creating a true customised learning environment).