Berkeley’s SIMS is offering what sounds like an interesting seminar. Xiao Qiang and Howard Rheingold will be leading a seminar in “Participatory Media”:
The purpose of this seminar course is to become familiar with the latest developments in information and communication technologies in regard to their potentials to enable political collective action and reshape patterns and structures of power in the physical world. In addition to analytic readings, the class will directly engage in collective knowledge-gathering and construction of a public good. Students will engage in social bookmarking and collectively construct a resource wiki on class topics. Students will start from a pool of potential resources via the smartmobs.com blog and smartmobs del.icio.us tag, and will be encouraged to find and tag new resources that are not already in that pool. Students will post links and brief descriptions of their selections on the wiki, explaining in the first comment attached to the wiki page why this entry is valid and useful; others can comment subsequently, and edit the page if necessary. By permission of instructors, participants who are not physically present at class sessions can participate online. At the end of the semester, the wiki will be open to reading and writing by the public.
If I just had the time, I’d find out if they’d have me…
Meanwhile there’s an intriguing syllabus.
This is great! At http://www.BlinkList.com, we have long seen the potential of using a bookmarking engine as a social learning and knowledge management tool. I am glad to see that some classes are starting to integrate this into their coursework since I really do believe that these tools can be an excellent way to share and discover new content on the web and accelerate and facilitate the learning process.