I’m teaching my first course this fall – INLS 490.151 - it’s a course of my own construction exploring online social networks. Building a syllabus was an interesting (and somewhat nerve-racking) experience, but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.
If you’d like to check out the syllabus, you can find a link from the course website. I’m using a wiki to host the course materials, and we’re going to hold our online discussion inside a Facebook group I’ve created for the class. I’m pretty interested to see how that works out; I’ll likely write a little bit about it at the end of the semester. Unfortunately, no Facebook apps for course management appeared in the past few weeks, but I’m frankly pretty happy with the functionality of Groups (though I wish there was a way to upload items to groups). In addition to Facebook and the wiki, we’re using tagging to send resources back and forth.
Feel free to let me know if you have any ideas, suggestions or recommendations – this is my first time teaching so I know I’ve got a lot to learn!
Tags: inls490, social networks
If there is time (and it looks like you’ve already got a full schedule), it might be good to briefly address the role that marketing, advertising, and other “monetization” issues are playing in the development of online social networks. At the end of the day, someone has to pay for all of the server space, bandwidth, and development costs and how those costs are paid seems to have a strong effect on many important aspects of online social networks, including the fundamental survival of the network (as hosted in and on that particular service).
Apologies if this topic is in the syllabus and I simply missed it!
I notice that the course reading list on the wiki is behind authentication – I’d love to take a look on what’s on the list.
If you’d like to view the readings, just send me an email and I’ll send you the credentials.