Global experiment examines social media for educational content

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A global experiment based on the social media technology behind Twitter and Facebook aims to find out how the social activity around online educational content can be captured and fed back to users, creators and publishers.

The 10-month experiment will be carried out by the Learning Registry, a project funded by the US Departments of Education and Defence, along with the UK’s JISC and the HE Academy. The partners are calling for institutions and developers to work with them on the project that they hope will lay the foundations of an infrastructure that will improve the way people choose educational information online.

The project, which is gathering together conversations, ratings, recommendations and usage data around digital content, aims to assess how we can create the technical capabilities to reveal a rich picture of what people are doing with educational content.

'We know that users and providers want access to more information about how educational content is used by others and this is an innovative approach to meeting that need,' commented Amber Thomas, JISC programme manager.