I’m taking a course this semester called Social Software Affordances, taught by Ulises who I met in the Technology and Society course this past Spring.

We’ll be studying the current impact and future possibilities of social software — blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, social bookmarking, etc. From the syllabus:

‘Social software’ has become a convenient label to group a new generation of socio-technical systems (mostly web based) that facilitate human expression, communication, and collaboration. Examples of social software include content management systems such as blogs, knowledge and collaboration management systems such as wikis, relationship management systems such as Friendster and Orkut, distributed classification systems such as del.icio.us and furl, and the use of RSS feeds to distribute information to specific audiences.

Social software represents the promise of truly networked human communities extending across the online and offline dimensions of reality. But beyond the hype, a critical approach to social software is necessary in order to explore its impact and possibilities.

I’m pretty excited about it. For the past year or so I’ve been putting some time and effort into building up my online presence, because I want to take advantage of the new social opportunities it affords me. I think it can enrich my life by enriching my interactions with others, and open new social avenues that weren’t possible before “going online”.

Of course, this class isn’t “Blogging 101″. It’s more about the bigger picture: trying to figure out how these new technologies can change the social fabric and the way we interact. But like “Blogging 101″, we’ll be communicating and posting assignments mainly through blogs and wikis.

I had the option of creating a new blog specific to the class, but since my personal blog hasn’t been seeing much action (to the tune of 2 posts a month!) I figure it has the room to spare. So expect to see lot’s of social software related posts here in the next 3 months.

Also, I’ve enabled categories to facilitate weeding out all the nonsense posts about other peoples’ cats or the onion garden growing in my fridge. Not that you’d *want* to weed out such great content, but you could.