New social media interface comes to OWL-Space

By Dixita Viswanath     1/30/13 6:00pm

Bored of Facebook and Twitter? Sitting in class and already paged through all of Reddit? Now you can use another social media outlet to vent your feelings to the general public. OWL-Space offers its own options to connect with your friends and professors at Rice. Last August, OWL-Space rolled out a new social networking tool that allows Rice students to connect with each other, Director of Academic and Research Computing Gary Kidney said. This addition can be used by students, faculty and staff alike.

OWL-Space is built on a platform called Sakai, according to Kidney. Sakai proposed this upgrade a few years back and has worked on the change primarily to keep up with the social media trend.

According to Vice Provost for Information Technology Kamran Khan, integrating social media into OWL-Space is the next logical step in fostering social connections.

---

---

"Adding tools that allow deeper and richer conversations within an online learning environment is an important step forward," Khan said. "As social networking and media have gained such importance in modern culture, enabling those capabilities in support of learning is natural."

Senior Instructional Technology Specialist Angela Rabuck said this feature can be accessed by anyone who has an OWL-Space account. The OWL-Space profile tool located under the "My Workspace" tab currently allows users to form "connections" with other users on OWL-Space. Rabuck said users can search for connections either by name or by common interests, similar to the way users can add friends on Facebook. Searching can be expanded to all OWL-Space users or limited to users in a specific course. Users can link their OWL-Space accounts to their Facebook or Twitter accounts and can update both concurrently, Rabuck said.

Next August, Sakai plans to introduce a new global chat feature within OWL-Space allowing users to chat with any other user viewing the same course site. A user can go offline whenever needed, Kidney said.

A few classes are already using this feature to form connections between students and faculty. Khan said Rice's Information Technology Department hopes to see its use increase in the future.

Professor of Chemistry Julianne Yost said she uses OWL-Space extensively in her classroom to post assignments, send out announcements and communicate with her students; however, she said she is skeptical about the new OWL-Space features.

"I was always taught to keep my personal life separate from my Rice life," Yost said. "I have had students friend request me on Facebook before, and I have always told them that I would accept them after they graduated [from Rice]."

Will Rice College junior Patrick Jacobson said he believes these new features will connect professors and students and provide another means of communication between the two.

"I feel like it [will] be helpful [because it will] make it easier for professors to connect with students," Jacobson said. "In my experience, whenever a professor has difficulty navigating OWL-Space or talking to students, it makes the students' lives much harder than [they have to be]."

---