Communities and social software

This course is still in forming stage only...

Main idea - to give a general overview of social software and community models in lectures and practical skills in using different social applications and methods in labs.

The Course:

 * 16 weeks (one semester/term), 2 academic hours of lectures and 1 hour of labs weekly (2-0-1) - in practice, one 1.5-hour lecture every week, one 1.5-hour lab every other week, plus independent work.
 * 3.0 Estonian academic credits, 4.0 ECTS credits

Lectures:

 * 1.Community – what's that?
 * 2.Special features of online communication
 * 3.Social software – building blocks of online communities
 * 4.Learning communities
 * 5.Social networking sites – the bane of the youth?
 * 6.The WikiWorld
 * 7.The blogosphere: you can be a journalist, too!
 * 8.Feeding the news – RSS, Atom and others
 * 9.Social bookmarking and tagging
 * 10.Building software the Linux way – community-based software development
 * 11. ....

Labs:

 * 1.General introduction
 * 2.Sharing the content: Flickr, Frappr
 * 3.Wiki editing
 * 4.Bookmarking and tagging – del.icio.us, Technorati, Rojo
 * 5.Learning authoring – LeMill
 * 6. ......

Different faces of social networking
1. Visit the following social networking sites:


 * MySpace
 * orkut
 * FaceBook
 * Friendster
 * tribe.net
 * hi5.com

2. Pick three of the sites and write a more detailed comparison (either as a separate paper or blog entry), try to find secondary information as well (online articles, news items etc). Try to outline:
 * main target groups
 * main activities
 * special traits
 * controversial issues, if any (check secondary sources)
 * best and worst features (your opinion)

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 * Create a bookmark collection at del.icio.us
 * Create a photo album at Flickr
 * Write an introduction about yourself at the course wiki
 * Write about the experiences in a blog

Links:

 * IT Manager's Guide to Social Computing - a nice little (quite basic) introduction to social software
 * FARIVAR, C. (2006) Blogging from the Belly of Beirut. Wired News, July 21, 2006. A thought-provoking story of anti-war blogging.