Syllabus

Internet encyclopedias go head to head, the Nature paper on Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica, and the response from Encyclopedia Britannica (one thread starter for the two topics in this bullet)
Magnus, P. (2008). Early response to false claims in Wikipedia. First Monday, 13(9-1).
The Right Way to Fix Inaccurate Wikipedia Articles, by Durova (an interesting and short article)
Kittur, A., & Kraut, R. E. (2008). Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in Wikipedia: Quality through coordination. In CSCW'08: Proceedings of the ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work. New York: ACM Press.

Read one of the following popular press articles about Wikipedia problems and scandals and Wikipedia's handling of these cases

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essjay_controversy )
Kennedy assassination & the Wikipedia article on the John Seigenthaler
Podcast inventors
False identity among Wikipedia authors.
Seeing Corporate Fingerprints in Wikipedia Edits, NYTimes (short, should try out the Wikipedia Scanner at http://wikiscanner.virgil.gr/ and see what tasty tidbits you can find)

Don't forget that people who signed up should start threads on the course blog by Sunday evening, everyone else should reply for the rest of the week

Homework #1 (individual) due this week

Due before class Sep 1 . Identify a project in Wikipedia that you think you could contribute to. A comprehensive list of Wikipedia projects is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject (or, you can choose a project by going to an article's talk page and seeing which project it is part of). Pick two articles to improve within this project. These article could either be about topics on which you have expertise or on which you are willing to do some research. Be sure to read the talk-pages associated with the articles you will edit and prepare a short written rationale about why you are making changes to the page that will be posted on the talk page (1-3 sentences).
Create the text to improve the article and a rationale for why your changes are an improvement, but don't post them to Wikipedia yet! Instead, post the text for these as a new thread by creating a new thread at Homework/HW1-Wikipedia contributions. Label them as #1 and #2 for each article respectively (you can put everything in a single message board post). We will grade you on the extent to which your edits, if accepted, will improve the article.

During class on Sep 1, we will flip a coin.
- If heads, you will submit your text and rationale for #1, and only your text for #2.
- If tails, you will submit only your text for #1, and your text and rationale for #2.

9/3-9/8: Membership lifecycles/Socializing newcomers (2)

Readings

Kraut, R., Burke, M.& Riedl, J. (In press). Dealing with newcomers. In R. E. Kraut, P. Resnick, S. Kiesler, J. Riedl, Y. Chen & J. Konstan (Eds.), Designing from theory: Using the social sciences as the basis for building online communities.
Preece, J., & Shneiderman, B. (2009). The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating technology-mediated social participation. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(1), 13-32.
Ducheneaut, N. (2005). Socialization in an Open Source Software Community: A Socio-Technical Analysis. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 14(4), 323 - 368 337-359 (read section 3.2.2: (A case study of successful socialization: Fred) especially carefully.
Bryant, S.L., Forte, A., & Bruckman, A. (2005). Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of a Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia., in Proceedings, GROUP05, November 6-9, 2005, Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

Homework #2 is due before class Sep 8

The goal of this assignment is to have you think about your experiences in editing Wikipedia, especially as a newcomer either to Wikipedia itself or to the project that “owns” the page you edited. You are to analyze what Wikipedia does to make you feel part of Wikipedia or the project or to not feel part of it. This can be FAQ and policy pages that Wikipedia put in place to guide newcomer or the interaction (or lack of interaction) you have with more experienced Wikipedians or project members.

Here are some sub-questions you can address. Note, we do not expect you to address them all. In general, a narrow paper, that which treats one of these questions in depth, will be better than a broader one that treats more questions superficially.

How did you know what to write and how to write it?
What would it take to feel part of the project to which you contributed?
How did others respond to you and how did these reactions (or lack of them) influence #1 or #2?
What concrete change could Wikipedia or the project make to better socialize newcomers?

Include in your report a description on what happened with each your edits on Wikipedia. Did they get changed at all? Did anyone comment on them? Be sure to include what condition each contribution was in (i.e., did you include rationale or not)

The assignment should be submitted as a 2-4 page essay, posted as a new thread to the homework 2 forum

Show and tell 9/3:

Show and tell 9/8: Guido Zgraggen (will present www.buzzillions.com)

9/10: Research ethics (1)

Readings

Kraut, R., Olson, J., Banaji, M., Bruckman, A., Cohen, J., & Couper, M. (2004). Psychological Research Online. American Psychologist, 59(2), 105–117.(Guido Zgraggen)
Hudson, J., & Bruckman, A. (2004). “Go Away”: Participant Objections to Being Studied and the Ethics of Chatroom Research. The Information Society 20(2), 127 - 139 (Smitha Prasadh)
Williams, K. D., Cheung, C. K. T., & Choi, W. (2000). Cyberostracism: Effects of being ignored over the Internet. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 79(5), 748-762. (Skim only)

In class

The Hudson & Bruckman paper suggests that if we asked people in public online settings, they won’t want to be observed for research purposes. But federal regulations don’t require informed consent for observation of behavior in public settings. Is observation without informed consent ethical?
Is the experimental procedure in the Williams et al paper ethical? What criteria should you use to make this judgement?

Homework (individual)

Everyone should do IRB training, at http://phrp.nihtraining.com/users/login.php . Please save a copy of the certificate that you will get at the end of training and post it to the course website under the HW3 forum.

Show and tell 9/10: Jaffer Haider (will present www.stackoverflow.com)

9/15-9/17: The Web as Social Network (2)

Readings

Wellman, B. (2001). Computer networks as social networks. Science, 293(14 September), 2031-2034. (Soo-Yung Cho)
Milgram, S. (1969). The small world problem. In M. Sherif & C. W. Sherif (Eds.), Interdisciplinary relationships in the social sciences (pp. 103-120). Chicago: Aldine. (Jaclyn Wainer)
Dodds, P. S., Muhamad, R., & Watts, D. J. (2003). An experimental study of search in global social networks, Science, 301, 827-829: American Association for the Advancement of Science. (?)
boyd, d. (2006). Friends, friendsters, and myspace top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. First Monday, 11(12), np (Smitha Prasadh)
Backstrom, L., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J., & Lan, X. (2006). Group formation in large social networks: membership, growth, and evolution. Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining, 44-54.

Show and tell 9/15:

Show and tell 9/17:

9/22: Project Pitch Day (1)

No Readings

Homework #4 (individual) due before class Sep 22 in the HW4 forum.

All students will either propose a class project on the class forum and/or provide feedback on someone else's project. Post your project ideas in the homework forum on project ideas. Please do this well before class, so that everyone will have had time to at least think about projects. You can also use the course site to find potential teammates. If you are proposing a project, consider putting down what your skill set is, who else is already interested, and what other skill sets you need.
In class: Make pitches and form project teams

9/24-9/29 Social Impact of Social Networks (2)

Readings

Ellison, N. B., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The Benefits of Facebook" Friends:" Social Capital and College Students’ Use of Online Social Network Sites. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12(4), 143-1168 (Jaffer Haider)
Gilbert, E., & Karahalios, K. (2009). Predicting tie strength with social media CHI'09: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computer Systems (pp. 211-220). New York, NY: ACM Press. [alt. link, for those unable to access the ACM one] (Justin Cranshaw)
Bessière, K., Kiesler, S., Kraut, R. E., & Boneva, B. (2008). Effects of Internet use and social resources on changes in depression. Information, Communication & Society, 11(1), 47 - 70. (Matthew Morosky)

Optional

Anon (In press). Adolescent Peer Relationships and Behavior Problems Predict Young Adults' Communication on Social Networking Websites. Developmental Psychology.
Thompson, C. (2009, Sep 10). Is happiness catching. New York Times, from http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/13/magazine/13contagion-t.html?ref=magazine

Show and tell 9/24: Joe Etzine - The Sixty One

Show and tell 9/29:

10/1-10/8: Encouraging Contribution (3)

Readings

Kraut, R. E., & Resnick, P. (In press). Encouraging online contributions to online communities. In R. E. Kraut, P. Resnick, S. Kiesler, J. Riedl, Y. Chen & J. Konstan (Eds.), Designing from theory: Using the social sciences as the basis for building online communities. (Jaclyn Wainer)
Wasko, M. M., & Far, S. (2005). Why should I share? Examining social capital and knowledge contribution in electronic networks of practice. MIS Quarterly, 29(1), 3557 (Iliana Radneva)
Krogh, G. v., Spaeth, S., Lakhani., K. R., & Hippel, E. v. (2003). Community, joining, and specialization in open source software innovation: A case study. Research Policy: Special Issue On Open Source Software Development
Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Terveen, L., & Riedl, J. (2007). Suggestbot: Using intelligent task routing to help people find work in wikipedia. In Proceedings of the 12th acm international conference on intelligent user interfaces. New York: ACM Press. (Jeffrey Grossman)
Harper, F., Li, S., Chen, Y., & Konstan, J. (2007). Social comparisons to motivate contributions to an online community. Lecture Notes In Computer Science, 4744, 148. [OR] (Prerna Ramesh)
Harper, F. M., Raban, D., Rafaeli, S., & Konstan, J. A. (2008). Predictors of answer quality in online Q&A sites HCI'08: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. NY: ACM Press. (Sean Kim)
Why people participate on Mechanical Turk. Panos Ipeirotis. http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2008/03/why-people-participate-on-mechanical.html (Conrad Wredberg)
Scientists shun Web 2.0. The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/03/11/sxsw_science_web_2/ [Why do you think science hasn’t taken up the social web? Or has it] (Kyle Sandrock)

Homework

Develop or Improve a Social Web Design Patterns :http://socialweb09.hciresearch.org/content/hw5-contribution-homework describes the homework in more detail. Due before class on Oct 13th.

Show and tell 10/1: Matthew Morosky on okcupid.com

Show and tell 10/6: Soo-Yung Cho (Q&A based search - www.naver.com, wiki.answers.com)

10/13-20: Social sense making: Wisdom of Crowds & Information Cascades (3)

Readings

Widsom of the crowds
Surowiecki, J. (2005). The wisdom of crowds: [UPDATED LINK] Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations little. New York: Doubleday. (Cha[pter 1).(Skyler Speakman)
Galton, F. (1907). Vox populi. Nature, 75, 7.
The wisdom of the chaperones. Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2184487/?from=rss (Guido Zgraggen)

Recommenders and social recommending
Resnick, P., & Varian, H. R. (1997). Recommender systems. Communications of the ACM,40(3), 56-58. (Jeremy Kanter)
5 problems of recommender systems. Read/Write Web. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/5_problems_of_recommender_systems.php(Charanya Kannan)
MrBabyMan: Digg Users Revolt, Against the One Pure Man at the Top. Read/Write Web. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digg_users_revolt_against_mrbabyman.php
Digg’s recent bans and the limits of crowdsourcing. Mashable. http://mashable.com/2008/10/08/digg-bans/ (Alex Tambellini)
Reducing the Risks of New Product Development, by Ogawa and Piller, Sloan Management Review (Soo-Yung Cho)
Berg, J. E., & Rietz, T. A. (2005). The Iowa Electronic Markets: Stylized facts and open issues. In R. W. Hahn & P. C. Tetlock (Eds.), Information markets: A new way of making decisions. (pp. 142-169). Washington DC: AEI Press. (Justin Cranshaw)

Information cascades
Sometimes crowds aren’t that wise. Read/Write Web. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sometimes_crowds_arent_that_wise.php (Jaffer Haider)
Salganik, M. J., Dodds, P. S., & Watts, D. J. (2006). Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market. Science, 311(5762), 854-856.

Show and tell 10/13:Prerna Ramesh on www.youthpad.com

Show and tell 10/15: Conrad Wredberg on www.yelp.com

10/22-10/29: Project Midterm Presentations (2+)

In-Class

Each group will give a presentation on the topic they are working on, their work to date, and open issues they have. The amount of time for each presentation will depend on how many groups there are.
Each person in the class will be given several index cards on which they can provide feedback to groups

Homework #5 (group) due Tues Oct 20

Each group will post their final project proposal & project progress report to the forums. Everyone will also be assigned another project proposal to critique, giving feedback to that group. Project progress reports should be about 3 page long, describing the problem, what methods will be used, how your work relates to the papers we have (or will) read in class, what you hope to learn or show and the progress you have made.

10/29-11/3: Finish Project Presentations + Tagging & Crowdsourcing (1)

Tagging

Furnas, G.W., Landauer, T.K., Gomez, L.M., Dumais, S.T. (1987). The vocabulary problem in human-system communication. CACM. (alt. link :http://www-personal.si.umich.edu/~furnas/Papers/vocab.paper.pdf -Sam H.)
Clay Shirky. Ontology is overrated. http://www.shirky.com/writings/ontology_overrated.html (Conrad Wredberg)

Crowdsourcing

Science by the masses. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/319/5871/1750 (Sam Henteleff)
Kittur, A., Chi, E., Suh, B. (2008). Crowdsourcing user studies with Mechanical Turk. CHI 2008.
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk used for fraudulent activities. Read/Write Web. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazons_mechanical_turk_used_for_fraud.php
How computer users can search for Steve Fossett from their desktops. Times Online. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article24258...
Online Fossett searchers ask, was it worth it? Wired. http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/news/2007/11/fossett_search

Homework

Submit a written progress report to the course forums by Oct 29 (we will create a thread for this). Feel free to provide constructive feedback to other teams. Turn in mock IRB at same time, if applicable to your project

Show and tell 10/27:

Show and tell 10/29:

11/5-11/10: Online Games (2)

Readings

Nardi, B., & Harris, J. (2006). Strangers and friends: Collaborative play in world of warcraft. In CSCW 2006: Proceedings ACM conference on computer-supported cooperative work. New York: ACM Press. (Katy Linn)
Williams, D., Ducheneaut, N., Xiong, L., Zhang, Y., Yee, N., & Nickell, E. (2006). From tree house to barracks: The social life of guilds in world of warcraft. Games and Culture, 1(4), 338-361. (Augustus Mayo)
Sweetser and Wyeth. GameFlow: A Model for Evaluating Player Enjoyment in Games . ACM Computers and Entertainment, Vol 3 No 3. (Augustus Mayo)
Ducheneaut, N., Yee, N., Nickell, E., & Moore, R. J. (2006). “Alone together?” Exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games. In CHI 2006: Proceedings of the ACM conference on human-factors in Computing systems. NY: ACM Press. (Matthew Morosky)
Halo 3: How Microsoft Labs invented a new science of play. Wired. http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/magazine/15-09/ff_halo?current...
The life of the Chinese gold farmer. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/17/magazine/17lootfarmers-t.html (Sean Kim)

Homework

Download the 10-day free trial version of World of Warcraft, at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/downloads/wowclient-download.html
This version of the download allows you to start playing as the rest of the game downloads.
We will organize you into groups of 3 or 4 and assign group members certain roles to play (i.e., damage, healer, etc). Part of your time will be spent playing solo, other parts will be spent playing together with your group.
Do a writeup on your experiences in World of Warcraft by Wed Nov 25 by midnight. Focus on issues we have discussed before in class, for example, designing for newcomers, what your group experience was like versus the solo experience, game design issues, etc.

Show and tell11/3: Jeremy Kanter

Show and tell 11/5: Sam Henteleff will present

11/12-11/17: The social web as a business/Starting a community (2)

Readings

Chen, Y., Konstan, J., & Resnick, P. (In press). Starting an online community. In R. E. Kraut & P. Resnick, Designing from theory: Using the social sciences as the basis for building online communities. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. (Emmanouil Kounelakis)
Barnett, W. P., & Leslie, M. (2006). Case e-220: Facebook. Stanford CA: Stanford University. (Katy Linn)
boyd, d. (2006, March 21). Friendster lost steam. Is myspace just a fad? Apophenia Blog, Retrieved July 30, 2007, from http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceEssay.html (Emmanouil Kounelakis)

Show and tell11/10:Charanya Kannan ( Iliketotallyloveit )

Show and tell 11/12: Iliana Radneva

11/19-11/24:

Conflict, coordination & control (2)

Readings

Kiesler, S. & Kittur, N. (In press). Coordination chapter (Iliana Radneva)
Kittur, A., Suh, B., Pendleton, B. A., & Chi, E. H. (2007). He says, she says: Conflict and coordination in Wikipedia CHI 07: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 453-462). New York, NY: ACM Press
The trolls among us. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?_r=1 (Alex Tambellini)

A rape in cyberspace. Julian Dibbell. http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/bungle.html (Can Duruk)
Secret mailing list rocks Wikipedia. The Register. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/04/wikipedia_secret_mailing/ (Can Duruk)
Bank failure in second life leads to calls for regulation. Wired. http://www.wired.com/gaming/virtualworlds/news/2007/08/virtual_bank (Jeffrey Grossman)

Show and tell 11/19: Abhishek Arora(Orkut)

Show and tell 11/24: Gautam Dewan (Edulix)

Skyler Speakan (Fark.com)

11/26 Thanksgiving (no class)

12/1-12/3:

Visualizations & sense making (2)

Readings

Viegas, F.B., Wattenberg, M., van Ham, F., Kriss, J., McKeon, M. (2007). Manyeyes: A site for visualization at internet scale. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 13 (6), 1121-1128. (Prerna Ramesh)
Donath, J., Karahalios, K., Viegas, F. (1999). Visualizing conversation. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 4(4),. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol4/issue4/donath.html (Sam Henteleff)
Turner, T. C., Smith, M. A., Fisher, D., and Welser, H. T. (2005). Picturing Usenet: Mapping computer-mediated collective action. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 10(4), article 7. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol10/issue4/turner.html (Kyle Sandrock)
Kittur, A., Chi, E., Suh, B. (2008). Can You Ever Trust a Wiki? Impacting Perceived Trustworthiness in Wikipedia. CSCW 2008: Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. New York: ACM Press. (Jeremy Kanter)
The best tools for visualization. Read/Write Web. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_best_tools_for_visualization.php (Charanya Kannan)

Show and tell 12/1: Justin Cranshaw (polyvore.com)

Show and tell 12/3: Emmanouil Kounelakis (Twitter)

Cancelled: The Social impact of the social web (1)

Reading

Putnam, R. D. (1995). Tuning in, tuning out: The strange disappearance of social capital in America. PS: Political Science and Politics, 28(4), 664-683. (Kyle Sandrock)
Resnick, P. (2000) Beyond bowling together: Sociotechnical capital. Chapter 29 in HCI in the new millenium, edited by John M. Carroll. Addison-Wesley. 2001, pages 247-272
Fackler, M. In Korea, a Boot Camp Cure for Web Obsession. New York Times, Nov 18, 2007. (Abhishek Arora)
Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous. Slate. http://www.slate.com/id/2224932(Skyler Speakman)

Final Project presentations (during exam period)

December 8 6:00PM.-9:00PM. Room TBA

Final Project will be due Tue Dec 15th at 5PM

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