Communities and social software

NB! This is only a development "sandbox" - the ongoing course is currently located at the Owl Academy.

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. ......

Assignments:

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)

---

• 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.