Furthermore, as Matt Jones states, the tech concerns of social software seem to be overriding the human-centered concerns. One might argue that it’s a different approach to design – build the infrastructure, then let everybody tinker – but that still seems like engineering/requirements-driven design rather than design informed by human behavior and needs.

Here’s a post from Tanya with links to several good introductions on social informatics. She also mentions another article that contains a good overview of computer-supported cooperative work and also discusses ethnography, library and information science, computer-mediated communication, and computer-supported cooperative learning. Other approaches like social computing also come to mind, and I’m sure social scientists would have more to add as well.

In the end, I guess I don’t have a problem with people rallying around a new name – this is about group-forming, and new groups love to recognize/differentiate themselves with names – but it’s distressing to see decisions made that either aren’t informed by previous research or are made in the interest of technology without thinking long and hard about the human issues first.

From Red Rock Eater Digest

Smart mobs emerge when communication and computing technologies amplify human talents for cooperation. The impacts of smart mob technology already appear to be both beneficial and destructive.

from Black Belt Jones

Before I became such a user-experience dork, and after I was a biology and music dork, I had a brief career as an education dork. I worked doing instructional design at a startup, and one of the courses I developed (a high school study skills course) is now being used by something like 50,000 kids. There’s obviously a lot of crap out there in the world of computer-mediated education, but I remain certain that it’ll be one of the few things that pushes any real reform into our hobbled little educational system that exists today.

There – now you know a bit more about me. The mythical redesign is progressing slowly, and I hope to begin some production in the next week, so these tidbits will have to tide you over until I get BCF 2.0 released.

Institutional discourses are dispersed across the programs, laws, and buildings into which they are inscribed, and then they are distributed among the many individuals who learn to use them. Institutions operate largely in a distributed fashion through the incentives that motivate their participants to pursue careers within them, and the unfolding career strategies they adopt.