Social Software Class

I also want to thank Steve for having developed this class for SCILS. I feel that the knowledge and experience I gained from it will be invaluable to me in my career and think all the material covered was important. I also think the order of the topics presented flowed nicely.

If anything could be added, I would have liked to have learned a little more about/gotten to use Skype. (I know now we at least know about it, but I like having my hand held when trying new things.)

I also think that while using the different applications (like Twitter and Blogger) each week for our posts was important in helping us develop familiarity with them, I don't think class discussions ever got as deep and involved as they did in the other online courses I've taken which used the threaded discussions in eCollege. I'm not suggesting adding eCollege discussions to each week's class assignments (that would just push the workload way over the edge!) I'm just pointing out the observation of my experience. In past courses, I was always sure to read what everyone had written already before I posted anything (just as one would hear everything that was said in order in a F2F class), but I found myself usually posting my own blog entries here before reading everyone else's. I think the threaded discussions in eCollege also encourage people to comment more on their classmates' comments and explore different topics and tangents each week. I missed many of the comments people had made on my comments (until I realized I should check the "email notification" option in blogger's comment section...but, even then, I didn't always check my class-made emails on a very regular basis, so still became aware of new comments sometimes weeks afterwards.) While GoogleReader and Bloglines made it very convenient to read everyone's blog posts each week, their not showing comments made to each post was a major drawback. (I initially tried clicking on everyone's blog post to read the comments made to it, but that ended up becoming very time consuming.) I'm sure aggregators will improve over time and perhaps, this will one day be a feature they will have. If this were the case, blogging each week would be more like like a real "class discussion" and less like individual weekly presentations.

But, overall, I really loved the class and enjoyed "meeting" and working with everyone. I love the idea of meeting up again virtually somewhere too after the semester.