If we didn't have to visit the appropriate item to find out the URL (I can't remember any of the URLs below for example, so if I wanted to post them again I'd have to re-look them up), then it would be easier to share these in blog posts, discussions, etc and might encourage us to do it more.
To highlight this, here's a selection of the URLs I'm currently using for this OU course.
Blog
Main blog page:
http://learn1.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?u=ob735
I already have a unique username given to me by the OU (ob735), why do I need a separate number for the blog? Is the backend for the OU blog really limited to using numbers for usernames?
Surely
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/view.php?user=ob735
would be a lot more obviously mine and easier for others to access.
MyStuff
Item for Activity 2.1:
This isn't very obvious what it is or who it belongs to. There is no way I could post a link to this with going to the item and copying the URL.
This is probably very dependent on the backend, but might be worth feeding back to the developers and bearing in mind when other choose eportfolio platforms.
Wiki
Alan's Tutorial Group Page
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=129238&page=Alan's+group
OK, this is semi-friendly as the pages are referred to by name. Would it not be easier if the id was the course code instead (ie H808+08I). Again is the wiki id really limited to numbers?
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group
Further Tidying
These could all be further tidied by using something like mod_rewrite (depending on what runs the OU's servers) to tidy up the URLs even further.eg
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog/ob735
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/oublog_bg/view.php?user=ob735
wiki
http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki/H808+08I/Alan's+group
mapping to http://learn.open.ac.uk/mod/ouwiki_bg/view.php?id=H808+08I&page=Alan's+group
These would be much easier to work with.