Our expectations of the course
From JITT
Contents |
Carey
Lindsay
Mark
Most of all I’d like to find out about how to design successful social software; software that has the right underlying concepts, affordances and interactivity to encourage the formation, growth and maintenance of communities.
Within that there are kinds of social software that I haven’t tried out for myself; for example this is my first post to a blog. As another example, I’m registered to use elgg, purportedly a medium that encourages reflection, but I haven’t devoted time to exploring it. So the course is, I hope, going to be an opportunity for (mutual) exploration and observation of the characteristics and underlying principles / philosophy / etc of the social software in its manifold forms. This promise of group activity is good, because, betraying one of my biases, meaning is socially determined.
One of my interests is in educational systems, and within that, in personal learning environments. I’m interested in comments that I occasionally find (mostly in blogs) that disparate social systems can be combined to form a personal learning environment. OK, that concept, of a PLE, is pretty diffuse, and I can post a short paper I wrote on a space of PLEs if anyone wants. I am interested in if we can make a PLE out of existing systems. People tend to mention elgg and flickr here, and throw in 43things as well. Did I mean “we” in the sense of the course / workshops? Not particularly, but now I’ve written it, this may be an interesting target for us. After all we are using social software as a vehicle through which we can learn, not so? So what is the most efficacious way we can achieve that at a 'utilisation of social software' level?
Tags interest me: I’m not convinced about their ultimate efficiency, and as part of my future research I can see that I am going to get dragged towards tags, and automatic tagging. It would be interesting to discuss this further.
And now just musing aloud: As a computer scientist I see that at an implementation level social software systems are just server and database technology. Boring, simple stuff. And yet good social software systems are magical, wondrous things – they help build communities. Wow! Somehow I want to kill off my computer scientist attitudes to social software as something simple. As an interactive systems designer I’m mostly there already.
Finally, there is underlying theory….
Wilma
I’m interested in learning more about people’s use and perceptions of social software and what kinds of technologies fall within the category ‘social software’. I’d like to know more about uses of social software for collaborative networking, knowledge construction and acquisition and notions of ‘digital’ memory. I’d like to explore the way connections and interconnections are made in distance communication and to think about the kinds of tools that are being used for collaboration and whether such use is deterministic or not and, if so, how.
I’d also like to learn more about the potential for ‘cultural’ transformations through the use of social software – how does collaboration through virtual networks impact on the communications we produce and share? I’m intrigued by the notion of migratory texts (movement from one format or mode to another of images, sounds, texts, etc.)… and how the ability to mobilise texts through mobile devices and the use of social software like blogs, or folksonomic aggregators like Flickr, affects people's perception of audience and knowledge/meaning.
I’ve used wikis for research prior to the course but haven’t contributed to one before. I’m interested in how wikis work to construct and shape knowledge. I’m familiar with blogging, podcasting, general web design and tagging and use these regularly in my work and research.I would like to incorporate some of the things I learn through this course in my work at school. Getting students to use blogs and wikis to construct knowledge and shared texts, perhaps to expand the notion of shared learning spaces and, at the same time to consider who or what might shape those learning spaces. At school, we are in the process of exploring the introduction of a VLE and it would be useful to see how social software could be integrated into this kind of learning platform. I am also currently involved in a community blog on elgg.net.
Yishay
Technology has always facinated me so far as it creates new possibilities for humans to do things together. The last couple of years have seen an explosion of socially-oriented software systems. Terms like web2.0, social networks and read/write web and rule the hypeshpere. However, it is still unclear what exactly are people doing on MySpace, if wikipedia is more acurate than Britannica and why, what counts as social software and what doesn't (and are we heading for anti-social software)?
Its easy to say that blogs, wikis, shared bookmarking and all that are revolutionizing the web, transforming it into a massively participatory creative medium. It's much harder to explain how.
For me, this course is an opportunity to discuss these issues with people from diverse backgrounds and approaches. I hope it will help me refine my questions and perhaps even suggest an agenda for further explorations.
