mtl3p

Social Software in the University

I was debating between copypasting the whole article here or just linking to it. The discussion is what wiki’s/blogging/cms’s mean to universities and how they are reacting to them. Not well it seems from this post and from what I’ve seen so far. It’s definitly working its way in from the outside - via adventurous professors or on-the-ball graduate students. I’ve been privy to the discussions about social software at the IT department here and the attitude certainly isn’t one of excitement. It’s more like a “you first” scenario. Too bad when you consider the enthusiasm that has gone towards setting up wifi at conU and the success that has been.

Trying to find that article that Seb wrote why academics should blog. Can’t. Here’s some good notes from Liz on an academic/blogging breakout session she participated in.

Another link here.

This stuff is on my mind a bunch even more so than normal because things have slowed down at the experiment that is gameCODE. Not in terms of the activity of the group - they’re great and we’ve done a lot of cool stuff recently - but in terms of the online space. It was ramping up pretty well for the first 2 months, but things have definitely cooled down and there’s less activity right now. I’ve been neglectfull in my RA duties as I’ve been trying to get caught up in my classes but I don’t think it’s that. I think the binary-ness of public/private is a big problem, because you miss out on a lot of the reason’s to blog when your stuff is only available to a group of 20 other people. However, even that amount of public-ness seems to be a problem for people. I keep hearing again and again from academics (gamecoders and others) that they would be too worried to post stuff - because it could be stolen, or that their idea would be thought stupid because it wasn’t ready. It’s so far from the where I come from (which is the open-source idea of post early, post often) that I think I do a bad job of communicating with them.

I don’t think I’m being critical of them [academics] (I’m not trying to be) when I bring up this issue of miscommunication. It’s the same thing that I’m facing with my group and the same conversation that I’m having with MDCN. On the contrary, I applaud these academics for being courageous and being willing to have these conversations. These are the ones that are willing to put themselves out there. They sense that something is going on and that it has implications for their area and they are taking a closer look. A lot of the time this is expressed in feelings like “I couldn’t” or “I’m already overloaded” but I think that I’m going to try and view these statements as expressions of interest. Maybe I’m being optimistic, but even in the most negative reaction that I’ve heard about this I’ve never heard a tone of disinterest. That’s not such a bad place to be at the beginning of a discussion.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 8th, 2004 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Identity & Community / Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.