Image via Wikipedia This week, an article in the Daily Mail featured Lady Susan Greenfield telling us that the Internet is not good for us. Good grief. Ars Technica, among others, point out that neither the article nor Greenfield point to any real research supporting her claims. If the Internet is making us stupid, then [...]

I agree with Alex Golub’s stance in his IHE piece on Facebook. As he argues, the lack of granularity in friend settings creates a situation where you either cloister yourself or you don’t. It’s a very different world than the one we actually live in, where you have people that you work with and would [...]

I’ve been thinking about this in a number of contexts over the last week. As I’ve moved away from an institutional job, my online life increasingly *is* my life. I work with people all over the country and meet with them via skype, in second life, or just back and forth via a Google doc. [...]

Last night, the kids and I watched our usual roundup of Sunday night tv: King of the Hill, Simpsons, Family Guy. We started with this clever episode of King of the Hill on MySpace. I thought it captured the pros and cons of social networking quite well. A couple of my favorite moments: Donna: You [...]

The thing I love most about social software is the way it’s connected me to so many different people, from many many places. Certainly when I started reading blogs and then writing my own, I tapped into a resource that allowed me to engage in critical inquiry with people I wouldn’t normally be able to [...]

Today’s post is a presentation I’m giving in just an hour and a half about social networking. I haven’t added all the cites yet, but this will update automatically. Enjoy! Update: Here is a list of the sources for most of this material. All of these are interesting and present a variety of views about [...]

There’s a post this morning about how some people are complaining that Google Reader’s new feature where your shared items are shared with your contacts violates their privacy. Robert Scoble says that Google needs more granular privacy controls a la Facebook. I vote with his first response, that people need clarification on what public means. [...]

Via the Wired Campus Blog, I found Pronetos, a facebook-like app for sharing research and connecting with scholars. I like the look and feel of it. It’s missing some of the more fun elements of social networking, but it’s definitely got potential. Of course, I set up an account. Like I needed another social networking [...]

Later this week, I’m facilitating a discussion about the relationship between course management systems and social software. In my world, where course management means Blackboard, the two don’t relate together very well at all, imho. We have a third-party plugin for blogs and wikis in Blackboard, which quite a few people are using. I’d like [...]