A colleague once told me that what you want to strive for in your academic successes is inspiring 90% admiration and 10% jealousy. My friend and blog progeny Andy Phelps has managed to accomplish that with me in less than a week of blogging.
Not only was Andy slashdotted this weekend, but it has garnered him an invitation to the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference from none other than Tim O’Reilly himself.
It’s Andy’s focus on the “social software” aspects of gaming that drew Tim’s attention, and that’s exciting. We’re in the process of retooling our graduate program in IT, and I’d like nothing more than for it to become the premier location for studying social software in all of its forms—not just gaming, though games certainly factor into that.
If you’re reading this blog, you probably have more than passing interest in the concept of social software—since blogs are clearly a key component of this growing area of technology development and research.
So…here’s what I want to know from you, since you’re probably our target audience.
First, is there a need for a graduate degree program focusing on the development and implementation of social software? I know that NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts has an Interactive Telecommunications Program that already has a strong social software focus (how could it not, with Clay Shirky teaching there?). But what RIT can probably bring to the table is a stronger emphasis on backend skills and development processes.
Second, if there is a need (and/or interest) in such a program, what should it include? What would a graduate of such a program need to look like in order to be valuable in today’s development world?
From today’s dive into mark:
In the future, there will be so much open source software available, programmers will be judged by how much they know about it and how well they can glue it together to build solutions.
Yes!! That’s exactly what I want us to be teaching our students—undergrad and grad. We’re well on our way already with the courses we already offer, but we’ve still got room to grow in this regard.
My colleague Steve Jacobs is having his students in the “Writing for Interactive Multimedia” course use blogs this quarter. Several of them seem to be struggling with trackback, so I’m using this post to (a) point them to Ben & Mena’s new trackback tutorial, and (b) link to their posts so that they see a trackback in action.
So, Lauree, Kunal, Keith—here’s a ping in your direction. If you’ve got “allow pings” turned on in your blog preferences, this should result in a trackback to your entries.
If you want to test the process in reverse, you’ve got two options. First, you can make sure autodiscovery is turned on in your blog config, and simply link to the permalink for this post (http://www.it.rit.edu/~ell/mamamusings/archives/000406.html). MT should automatically determine the trackback URL. Alternatively, if you didn’t want to link to the post, but did want it to register a trackback, you could put the trackback URL (http://www.it.rit.edu/~ell/mt/mt-tb.cgi/395) into the “URLs to ping” box at the bottom of your entry screen.
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