Social Communications

Well a couple of quick OU bloggers have posted about the OU’s iTunes U presence (normally i’d just link from within that sentence but I’ve become painfully aware that the correct anchor text is Visit The Open University on iTunes U!). Quick work – and the OU press release isn’t even out!

This work sits alongside ongoing work with YouTube, and activity in spaces such as Facebook, Netvibes, Twitter etc. This is going to be brought together via a /use site will serve as a landing page for those people visiting the OU from external web spaces and introduce them to what else is on offer. The current /use page is all we are able to offer at the moment; it will be much better in the future!

So, what’s the coherent story around the OU’s activity in these third-party spaces? Well i think it’s partly captured by the intro text on /use; it’s about allowing people to make use of OU content for their own purposes (breaking down the us / them boundaries), it’s about letting people experience what the OU has to offer in the social spaces that they already feel comfortable with and not focusing solely on driving them to a corporate website, and it’s about being a genuine and valuable part of online communities.

A couple of passages from David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous come to mind: It [information] becomes authoritative precisely because it is not on the site of the business that produced it, and Web 2.0 allows information and services to be placeless, rather than locking them into the creator’s site.

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