The final post…

Well I suppose this is better late than never!  After a few bumps with my computer melt down and internet ups and downs I think I’m ready to conclude my thoughts on Social Software.

It’s hard to say which tool I enjoyed the most because they each have their purpose and are useful in their own ways.  On a personal and professional  note I throughly enjoyed Blogs, Wikis and Social Bookmarking.  In terms of Blogs I think I really liked its purpose for a distance course and would like to see more courses make use of them, though I’m not sure I recommend wordpress, due to its speed and strange frusterating quirks.  I’m eager to get blogging with my collegues at work as we have a large group of individuals interested in the use of Social Software Tools in our corporate environment.  As for blogging on a personal level, like an online journal, not so much for me! 

As for the wiki, again I am very excited to get this off the ground at work and start making use of it.  We focus alot of our work around policy and standards development and I think using a wiki as a stomping ground for SME’s (subject matter experts) to collaborate and work on specific policies there are many benifits to using wiki technologies.  Further, we are continuously creating glossaries, and acronym lists and this again would be a great forum to conduct this sort of develompment work.

As for Social Bookmarking, this is something I’ve already got people hooked on and I’m quite excited about it!  I’ve got them using delicious as a piolot experiment at the moment.  Many of us are constantly doing research and often our topics overlap.  Now we’re sharing resources in a much more condusive way (no long sending random links via email).  The meta tagging or folksonomy ability has been my biggest selling feature.

As for what could have been done better in terms of this course, i have tried to think of something but I simply can’t.  I was very pleased with the way we incorporated all of the tools we talked about and put them to use in a practical way.  The case studies along with the readings really grounded the topics for me.

All in all this was a fantastic couse and I would most certainly recommend it to upcomming students!

 Thanks everyone for a great term, interesting comments/discussions and an opportunity to try all the things I wanted to but didn’t have time to test before this course.  I think I now spend 25% more time on my computer now though! hahaha  But I believe its for the greater good of communication in the new age!

Happy Holidays! 

Cheers!!