Susan Goes to MIT : Designing Social Media

I'm traveling in Massachusetts this week and while here was excited to discover that Open CourseWare from MIT allows anyone interested in the subject matter to have access to course materials from across an amazingly brainy curriculum,

The catch - some contain material from five years ago. Granted, history doesn't change much, though our understanding of it does. So history courses could be among the most evergreen content and excellent resources.

A course that grabbed my interest however was the grad level offering Designing Sociable Media, examining social life in the on-line world.

"Its focus is on how the design of the interface influences people's interactions with each other and shapes the cultural mores and structures they develop. .... the ways social cues are communicated in the real and the virtual world, discuss the limits imposed upon on-line communities by their mediated nature, and explore directions that virtual societies can take that are impossible for physical ones.".

Wouldn't it be interesting to see how time and technological developments since this was presented have changed things - or how much it all stays essentially the same?

The question - how to fit one more thing into the schedule.

Instructors website for this course: http://smg.media.mit.edu/classes/SociableDesign2001/

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Other courses that piqued my interest:

• Developmental Entrepreneurship,
• Technologies for Creative Learning
• Social Visualization,
• Digital Anthropology
• Game Theory for Managers
• Downtown

For more information consult MIT OpenCourseWare Main page