ulises mejias

Before we forget all about the label Social Software and move on to Web 2.0, 3.0, or whatever comes next, I think it would be useful to dwell a little bit on the use of the word ’social’ as applied in this term. What does it mean for software to be social? Intuitively, we know that Social Software is software that fulfills some sort of social function, allowing us to form social connections, and perform social activities that give shape to social groups. But as evidenced by the number of times I just used the word ’social’ to define Social Software, it is clear that what we have here is a tautology: by taking for granted what we understand by ’social,’ the adjective in question both provides an absolute definition and at the same time manages to define nothing.

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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.

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UPDATE: For those who rather read the article online, I have pasted it below.
Back from Barcelona, where we had a wonderful time! Currently swamped with work and life, so the summary of the congress is going to have to wait a bit. However, I wanted to share the link to an article I just wrote [...]

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by Ulises A. Mejias
Abstract
Different meanings have been ascribed to the concepts of ‘community’ and ‘network’ throughout history, and particularly since the emergence of the internet. In this paper, I suggest definitions for these two concepts based on how social agency is distributed between humans and code, and outline a set of research categories for studying [...]

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Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org/) is the world’s largest online free-content encyclopedia. This means that unlike the content of traditional encyclopedias, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica, the content of Wikipedia is free. But perhaps a more important distinction is that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, at any time. This may sound counterproductive, as the purpose of an [...]

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UPDATE: For a response to some comments by James Farmer, Stephen Downes and Ian Kallen, see the bottom of this post.
Subtitle: A postscript to my work on Distributed Textual Discourse (DTD)
At last year’s 16th Annual Instructional Technology Institute Conference at Utah State University, I presented a paper on Distributed Textual Discourse. DTD is a model [...]

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Introduction:
Part of the allure of classifying things by assigning tags to them is that the user can give free reign to sloppiness. There is no authority —human or computational— passing judgment on the appropriateness or validity of tags, because tags have to make sense first and foremost to the individual who assigns and uses them. [...]

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In Literacy in the New Media Age, Gunther Kress (2003) argues that the image is displacing writing as the main resource for communication in Western societies. This does not mean, obviously, that writing is disappearing. But as Kress would put it, the world told is increasingly being replaced by the world shown—with all the social [...]

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Bookmark, Classify and Share:
A mini-ethnography of social practices in a distributed classification community
[Note: This is a project I did for a class on social and communicative aspects of the internet, taught by Chuck Kinzer. Not a 'real' study, but you might find some of the literature review and listed resources helpful. You may also [...]

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