CogBlogged Tagged ‘walled garden’

I flipped to Academia.edu after reading one blogger referring to it as “Facebook for Academia” and while it has a few FB-like features (updates) I could not think of a more opposite description for a social network. My analysis here is admittedly first impressions and shallow ;-) What it seems to provide is a social networking for faculty, to find academics with common research interests, to browse by departments and roles. The structure is a rigid tree. There is “universities” at the top that you scroll or navigate horizontally by name, departments underneath, followed by and orderly listing of people by roles, faculty in top, then post-docs, then… I have a gut level negative response to an org chart structure which feels as 18th century as can be, and some of this in the midst of thinking about the discussions of networks and chaos theory in the ongoing Connectivism and [...]