Learning on Facebook – Does This Make Sense?
| Ali - Januar 13th, 2012 | 2 Comments » |
From time to time we think about new features and useful add-ons for our flashcards app. Once we thought about developing a facebook app in order to enable users to use CoboCards directly on Facebook. Later we rejected that out of hand. Facebook is an entertainment platform and not a learning platform. Learning is a serious business. Noone should disturb you while learning.
Then we thought about a vocab game. In a given period of time participants should answer to 15 vocabulary cards from different categories (e.g. French A2, GRE etc). We never designed this idea. The reason is that people hardly interact on Facebook. Ok, they like photos, comment and watch videos. But that’s it. There was always a risk of developing something, putting a lot of effort in it and noone uses it later.
Why should learning not be entertaining? Or at least game-like? You have the infrastructure and data to create any card-based game you can think of. Implementing it as a Facebook canvas app or at least a Facebook aware web app makes it easy for people to share their gameplay experience, play with others, etc. I recommend doing something, even something very small. I would engage in competitive learning.
Thanks Frank. Our experience in the last 3 years shows that sharing flashcards is not that demanded. Nor do we think that competition is a way to get people to share things. Before starting to think about a Facebook app our users have to show more participation in the community. Especially our German users are learning alone and not willing to share anything.