EduGlu Sandbox

Merlin Mann wrote a great post called “Social Networks: The Case for a Social Network Pause Button“, where he suggests we need a few more states of engagement with social network applications as a way to manage the deluge of data.

Twitter has been bugging me for some time now. No, not the single-digit uptime. No, not the constant “Down for Updates” notices. No, not the slow unresponsive website and throttled API.

I just realized that Twitter is actually dangerous. Harmful. Damaging.

I’ve been prepping some resources to use during the Faculty Technology Days session on Social Networking tomorrow. How to best show what the Network is? What do the connections between people look like?

I should probably clarify a couple of things about what I was trying to say about social networks as sharecropping activities.

Heather posted something this morning that’s had me thinking about this pretty much all day.

Occasionally, Tim Bray talks about “sharecropping” as related to the world of open source vs. proprietary software and APIs.

I found a link to Nexus in my reader this morning thanks to a post from Information Aesthetics, and decided to check it out. It’s an app for Facebook that graphs out a member’s network, indicating connections and clusters. Here’s my network:

I’ve been monkeying with a Drupal site that looks like it could fulfill most (even all?) of the mythical Eduglu concept - a website that aggregates all feeds published by students in a class/department/institution, and helps contextualize them in the various groups/cohorts/courses each student participates in.