Social

In 2005, COSL engaged in a somewhat unsuccessful effort to bring social study groups to MIT OpenCourseWare. I’ve always been disappointed with how the project sputtered and ended. See, for example, the way the Discussion Group page for Linear Algebra looked back in 2005 on archive.org. Our analytics showed that fewer than 1 in 10 people who visited the Discussion Group page ever clicked on the link to visit the Open Learning Support study group. For a project where critical mass is the key to success, this was deadly. Aside from the link being in the same color as the text on the page, I’ve often wondered if the bullet list on the page scared people off a bit: ...

A nice, brief description of four technologies people think will be key to long-term portability of data across social media.