I spent some time thinking about my reaction. I'm signed up to a fair few social software services. I was an early adopter of Flickr. I like Flickr. I pay for an account, so I don't get the risk of advertising. I was irked when I had to switch my Flickr ID for a Yahoo! ID, and thought about leaving the service - but several of my friends are quite active on Flickr, and I don't see them as much as I'd like to, and their photostreams are a regular source of interest, comfort, and amusement. Flickr is useful to me as a place to stick my snaps, but, more, it is socially useful because my friends use it too. So I stayed on. The Yahoo! ID thing isn't too annoying if I don't think too deeply about it, and recently it looks like Yahoo! embracing OpenID, so maybe they are headed in the right direction after all.

 If I am honest, I find the commodification and monetisation of friendships and other social relationships on the headline social networking sites such as Facebook deeply unsettling. I understand that my clicks, my tags, my attention is being monetised by Flickr as much as it is by Facebook. But this is like Tesco's club card. If it's evil, it's with a small "e" - and I can monkey around with Tesco's profiling by offering to swap shopping with my sister now and then. In a perverse kind of way, I'm almost happy with the profiling. It grants me, if not immortality, a certain longevity in zeros and ones. Perhaps it may be sufficient to inscribe "Google me" on my tombstone, at least for a few years after I die...

What does bother me is how social networking sites commodify human relationships, creating the kind of "marketing personality" that Oliver James describes in his book, Affluenza. There's no doubt that, to use James's terms, they are vectors of the Affluenza virus, and they have a pernicious, corrosive effect on human relationships, for all the benefits they bring. I get round my discomfort by trying to not play the game. I try not to fall into the commodification traps these sites set. I suspect with only limited success.

Second Life is another thing entirely. Intended to be "immersive", you are bound by its rules, its grating insistence on the triumph of capitalism, its banalisation of the imagination, its reification of the pabula of Hollywood. The rules are not up for negotiation. In Second Life, exploring new social models is reduced to casual sex with dinosaurs. Confronted with SL, I come over all William Blake - "I will not cease from mental fight, Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand".

I've set up The Uncommunity. Try it if the Kool-Aid's lost its savour.

Are you worried about succumbing to group think? Do you want to test some assumptions? Are you new to the technology? Or maybe you don't want to join a club that would have you as a member.

The Uncommunity is for you. There's nothing to join (well, that you haven't joined already), and nothing to buy into. You don't need a Second Life membership. Become a friend of the Uncommunity - and a critical friend of the programme.

Hmm, I don't seem to be able to embed Flash objects here. A link will have to do.

View our Emerge Activity 7 slide. 

Don't get me wrong, Elgg's a great piece of software (though fix the Metaweblog API bugs!), but it's not the best blogging platform for incorporating images directly into posts. No platform I've come across is that good, I have to say. It'd pretty much be a show-stopper at Ravensbourne, though.

These are our themes:

• Digital technology is no longer exceptional. Learners bring their own computing, and their established social networking platforms into higher education. As well as calling the "institutional portal" and the VLE as we know them into question, it provides a great pedagogic opportunity to harness extra-institutional communities of practice into a wider, and more relevant, teaching and learning experience.
• The portal and the VLE are dead? Sure, there's something alive in the wreckage. Some learning content is at home in the VLE. And institutional resources should be discoverable. There is a value in the classroom as a psychological space that tolerates questions and failure.
• Integrating institutional functionality into commercial social software requires an approach based on radical simplicity. We thing RSS, the Atom Publishing Protocol, and various microformats are "good enough" to enable institutional systems to "plug into" social networking.
• This benefits practitioners as much as learners. Though we haven't quite got to the bottom of thinking through the PIE (personal instructional environment), we hope to get there soon.

The Team

Miles Metcalfe

Roger Rees

Remmert de Vroome

Ruth Catlow

Original image credits:

• Miles Metcalfe, ggunson
• Roger Rees, inkynobaka
• Remmert de Vroome, CiCCiO.it
• Ruth Catlow, laenulfean

It never does to analyse fun too deeply - because it rapidly stops being fun if you do. Part of the fun of the kind of fun I'm talking about is the sheer unexamined enthusiasm that children have. It's unlubricated, unapologetic, and, though fraught with the same status-consciousness of adult play, it is somehow more disarming for its naive sense of justice in the absence of anxieties refined over years of living.