Full Circle Associates

Ulises has posted a review of the course he taught this fall on social software, with social software.

This post discusses some of the lessons learned during a graduate course I taught at Teachers College, Columbia University. Social Software Affordances was offered during the Fall of 2005, and 13 graduate students from the Communication, Computing and Technology in Education (CCTE) program at TC enrolled in the course. The main goal of the course was for students to acquire proficiency in the use of blogs, wikis, RSS feeds and distributed classification systems while engaging in a critical analysis of the affordances of social software (what the software makes possible and what it impedes). The class also asked students to apply their newly acquired social software skills and knowledge to promote a social cause or project of their choosing. The dynamics and outcomes of the course are discussed below.

While the whole report is chock full of excellent observations, I really appreciated that Ulises used personal social responsibility as an anchor to the course, included strong elements of reflection to both enhance the participants learning and accrue benefits to those of us watching from the periphery, and that he asked his students some tough questions rather than just assume positive value of software. As he wrote "get them to think critically about its affordances."

If you ahve the time, check out the students' project blogs.

There is a lot of food for thought for me as I prepare my next Online Facilitation Workshop (which, despite the dates being wrong on this page, starts January 30th. Let me know if you want more information. Alumni, as always, you are invited back anytime!)

Technorati Tags: socialsoftware,, onlinecommunity