As all of my devoted Facebook friends already know, I bought slippers on Zappos this weekend and facebook added it to my “newsfeed”.  You can go to a zillion blogs for rants about the privacy implications and I don't disagree, although if I channel my inner teenager and think about the attention economy it seems sort of cool that all my friends know about my oh so warm new slippers.

Putting on my learning technology geek hat instead, I wondered how this idea could help teachers keep track of what content their students were using on the web.  In .LRN, as well as other LMS systems, teachers can load in content from a course pack, IMS, SCRORM package, etc., and make it available to their class. They can then review reports of  students, pages viewed, time on page, scores in exercises, etc.  However, more and more content is out on the web, not in a course package.  The National Science Foundations (NSF) National Science Digital Library (NSDL) project is just one example of the many.

Zappo knew I was a Facebook user and could, thus, tell Facebook all the details of my purchase because I had Facebook open in another tab (good post on the technical details). The same idea could work to have the page with the learning content (NSDL, for example) talk to various LMS systems. One possibility is the LMS providing an Open ID identity for the user, then, if the learning resources web site was also aware of the Open ID, it could include a js file that would share data with the Open ID provider. The LMS could, thus, be told relevant information about the students activities, such as what page they visited and even results of assessments or exercises in the activity.

What would be the advantage of this? Well, first, not everything is available in a form that could be loaded into your LMS. Organizations may want to keep the traffic on their own site, not want to invest the resources in creating uploaded packages, or may just want to be sure they have the ability to update the information. It is also easier for a teacher to remix by gathering links to various different sites, then loading and editing content from many sources.

So how do I like my slippers? Well, they shipped and arrived faster then I could finish my post! My actual teenager, Amos, says, "Weird, they have fancy grip soles and tassels."  I like them fine. :)