Deliberations

In my Masters degree course, which is reaching the end of the first term, the phrase social software has not been mentioned, nor even referenced. I started a small wiki in the collaborative networked environment (based on plone), but it crashed the whole system and nobody wants to broach that again.

One of my professors, a cognitive psychologist, is passionate about the Semantic Web. Whilst I wouldn't go so far as to suggest that Semantic Web is a Dead Duck, it's clearly not a going concern. I'm going to have difficulty writing my final long paper, knowing that my position is quite at odds with that of my professor. We read articles from a 2004 special issue of well-regarded Journal of Interactive Media in Education , dedicated to the Educational Semantic Web. In it, almost every writer either questioned the proposed configuration, inferred it would require a revolution to implement, or wrote in a speculative manner. Nonetheless, there are some in our small cohort who actually believe that it's a reality. And my comments to the contrary are ignored like those of a curmudgeon. It's been a frustrating distraction from what I see as the main game.

So when I read Teaching Social Software with Social Software: A report by Ulises Mejias (who I've blogged before), I just felt envious. In Mejias' class, they asked some serious, current questions and explored the very real social web landscape with academic intent.

In Mejias' tag cloud, the term semantic web doesn't even show up. Tag cloud? What's that?