Social affordances ( please click here for details)

door peace
….demonstrating the social affordances of the door discarded in the street – which here becomes a poster for Peace in the Park – an event that in the end will probably be more social than political. And....I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that most blogs have quite limited social affordances. OK, we can signal networks, links, namecheck other bloggers and so on; but that just leaves us with a linear chain of comments. Jennifer’s “unblog” has confounded expectations though, so despite adding a new comment her audience speaks more than she does (a ratio of 33:2 at the moment).

Keri Facer and her colleagues at Futurelab are organizing an interesting looking event next month in London on social software – unfortunately I’m too busy to attend – but it will help launch their publication “Social software and learning” which is great - highly recommended - and makes some important links. These crystallized for me on p.28 where the authors suggest that “…social software is enabling people to do things with internet technology that they clearly want to do themselves – and as they discover more things they want to do the software develops. Social software is therefore satisfying needs that map closely onto educational needs and current agendas. Social software is about personal services on the web, and consequently it is about personalization. It is inherently social, and the gains of using social software are gains that come from collaboration.” Couldn't have put it better!