Extended quote from  John Battelle’s Searchblog: A Brief Interview with Michael Wesch (The Creator of That Wonderful Video…)

As a university professor I have also found Facebook to be useful. I was inspired to use Facebook for teaching by something I saw while visiting George Mason University. Like many universities, they were concerned that the library stacks were rarely being accessed by students. Instead of trying to bring students to the stacks, they brought the stacks to the students, placing a small library right in the middle of the food court where students hang out. We can do the same with popular social networking tools like Facebook. Facebook is not only great for expressing your identity, sharing with friends, and planning parties, it also has all the tools necessary to create an online learning community. Students are already frequently visiting Facebook, so we can bring our class discussions to them in a place where they have already invested significant effort in building up their identity, rather than asking them to login to Blackboard or some other course management system where they feel “faceless” and out of place.

I hope the community of Moodlers are listening. I keep seeing the potential for Moodle (or another Open Source course management system) to become more like Facebook or to integrate Facebook-like features.  As it stands, Moodle and other CMS tend to force the idea of individual “courses” with subgroups of people with stable roles. Though Facebook could use more role-/status-differentiation, there’s something to be said about user communities going beyond labeled roles in a specific course.

(I’ve discussed some aspects of “that wonderful video” elsewhere, and also here.)