Dear friends interested in our upcoming "Information Technology and the Network Society" course,
As MIT OCW-centric World University and School's first online, free course, I'm planning to teach "Information Technology and the Network Society" (newly named) - see http://worlduniversityandschool.blogspot.com/2013/09/information-technology-and-network.html - on Thursdays from 5pm - 7pm Pacific Time (where I live in the SF Bay Area) which is 8pm - 10pm time Eastern Time, and which is 7am-9am on Friday mornings, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where Jessika (from the University of Toronto) is doing fieldwork for the next year. Please let me know how these times work for you, if you're thinking of taking the class We'll begin Thursday, September 19th at 5pm (1700) PT and end the course on Thursday December 12th.
Description of the Course:
What is information technology, broadly conceived? How did it develop? Who did it? What has been the process of diffusion into the economy and society? How and why did the Network Society take shape? What of the implications of networks in the Information Age? In this course, we’ll analyze the interaction between society and contemporary information technologies, in a multicultural and comparative perspective. In doing so, we’ll examine what data and evidence are in the social sciences, how it is used, and how it is interpreted.
We'll meet on Harvard's virtual island in Second Life - http://maps.secondlife.com/
We'll use the new book by Rainie and Wellman "Networked: The New Social Operating System" (MIT 2012 - http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/
While I have much to say about fascinating "Information Technology and the Network Society," the Conference Method involves talking to each other, as a start, and Second Life accommodates up to 40 people in voice and text chat (and is build-able, and thus stimulating imagination-wise), whereas Google + group video Hangouts accommodate up to 10 people in video and group text chat for free. Both are interesting for learning and teaching, as forums, in different ways, which we'll also explore.
Here's a previous, course wiki - http://socinfotech.pbworks.
I've decided not to explore designing the course anew in Google's course-builder https://code.google.com/p/
I've can send you the syllabus (without the resources for a required course) if you email me below.
In planning to design this course vis-a-vis how to build to a WUaS, MIT OCW course, accreditation-worthy standard, I'm synthesizing resources from C.C. MIT OCW courses (http://ocw.mit.edu) in a variety of ways.
Information Technology and the Network Society seeks to come into conversation with course participants about MIT OCW-centric course building during the semester.
This open course is for at-large participants interested in Information Technology and the Network Society, for students and information technology researchers, for prospective graduate students who might like to teach next year, as well as for hypothetical graduate student instructors hired by WUaS (WUaS is planning to hire MIT, Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cambridge graduate students + these universities - http://worlduniversity.wikia.
*
If you'd like to join this open conversation (and you haven't done this already), please
Get an avatar (free) for Second Life
Get a Gmail address, and set up your G+ profile for Hangouts (all free)
Get the book "Networked" (MIT 2012) by Rainie and Wellman, and begin reading
Invite friends to participate
Let me know at worlduniversityandschool@
Best,
Scott
)