Stephen Downes

I still get sceptical looks when I talk about using social media and network connections to evaluate a student (instead of the usual tests and assignments). My reasoning is that we can use the willingness of other people in the field to engage with a person (say) to evaluate his or her academic credibility. OK, it may be out there - but the same sort of idea has occurred to other people, including the people proposing to use social media to replace credit checks. "Facebook recently secured a patent for a technology which, among other things, could help determine your credit-worthiness based on the friends you keep on the social network."