Overview

 

Carnegie Mellon University: 05-320 / 05-820 Fall 2009
The Social Web: Content, Communities, and Context 

Class:             Tue Thu, 9:00-10:20

Room:            WEH 4623

Course site: http://socialweb09.hciresearch.org

Professor Niki Kittur
Email:           nkittur@cs.cmu.edu
Phone:           412-268-7505
Office:           NSH 2504d

 

Professor Robert Kraut
Email:            robert.kraut@cs.cmu.edu

Phone:           412-268-7694
Office:           NSH 3515

 

Course Description

With the growth of online environments like MySpace, Second Life, World of Warcraft, Wikipedia, blogs, online support groups, and open source development communities, the web is no longer just about information. This course, jointly taught by a computer scientist and a behavioral scientist, will examine a sampling of the social, technical and business challenges social web sites must solve to be successful, teach students how to use high-level tools to analyze, design or build online communities, and help them understand the social impact of spending at least part of their lives online.

This class is open to advanced undergraduates and graduate students with either technical or non-technical backgrounds. Course work will include lectures and class discussion, homework, class presentations, and a group research or design project.

Required Texts

There are no required texts for this course. There will be readings assigned for each class, most of which will be available online. Some of these readings are on the ACM digital library, which means that you have to access the URL from campus or use VPN to log in. CMU also provides a Web VPN at: http://www.vpn.cmu.edu

Grading

Cheating and plagiarism will not be tolerated. Students caught cheating or plagiarizing will receive no credit for the assignment on which the cheating occurred. Additional actions -- including assigning the student a failing grade in the class or referring the case for disciplinary action -- may be taken at the discretion of the instructors.

Your final grade in this course will be based on:

 

  • 20% Posts and comments on course discussion forum

  • 5%   Ratings of other posts

  • 10% Class attendance and participation

  • 10% Show and Tell (only for students in 05-820) 

  • 25% Homework

  • 30% Project

Homework. The primary weekly homework assignments for this course will be posting electronic messages about that week's readings to the course forum. There will also be periodic homeworks related to the readings

With respect to the course forum, each student will sign up for 2 slots for the semester, acting as thread starters for a particular reading (i.e. posting the first message about a specific reading). To simplify things, there should be only one thread per reading, with all thread starters for a reading posting in that thread.

All students (including the thread starters) will then continue the conversation with comments on the original thread starter's post and comments on comments. Students should also rate the thread starter post as well as commontss. In total, each student will need to make at least 3 posts per week to the course forum (though more is fine).

Students are also expected to rate other at least 10 posts (including both thread starters and replies) per week. These ratings will partially influence grades in the course and will be used to filter top-rated posts to the top. Students will be graded on their online participation, on the ratings garnered from other students, and on the instructors' judgments about quality of their posts.

Thread starters should be posted by Sunday evening. Replies can continue until the next set of readings the following Sunday. The thread starter should extend beyond a summary of the reading, to include points of discussion, interesting highlights, questions you would like to discuss in class, points you disagree with, and/or links to other relevant material. As a rough rule of thumb, thread starters should be 2-4 coherent paragraphs (though more is fine if needed).  Replies can be a paragraph or longer.

Some notes on thread starters / replies:

  • It's usually good to start with a brief summary, discussing what the article is trying to accomplish, what was done, what the main points are, etc. This part can be neutral (i.e. you are not advocating a position or stating your informed opinion yet).

  • Considering being evaluative.  Did the authors convince you of their main points?  Was the evidence they provided or other information you know about consistent with their thesis?

  • Consider connecting to and synthesizing with other material. For example, how does the current paper fit in relation to other readings that week or previously in the semester? How does the current paper relate to other web sites that you know about? Other theories you have learned in other classes? Other online material (for example, other papers online or other data online)?

  • Consider how the paper relates to the site you are an expert on for show-and-tell

  • Consider how you would improve what you have read. For example, if a research paper, what kinds of other directions the research should have gone in, or what other kinds of analyses could have been done.

  • Consider being intentionally controversial, taking a more extreme position than you would in real life (though not to the point of being insulting, of course)

Note that posts will be restricted to students in the class and other legitimate account holders. Thus, what you write will not be publicly available for all to see. This is to encourage more lively discussion.

Note that this class is heavy on reading! There are around 4 readings per week, translating to roughly 40-60 pages every week. This means that if you haven't already, you will have to get good at reading lots of text. Here are some tips:

  • Read the abstract, introduction, and conclusions first. Also, quickly skim over the entire paper first, so you get a basic understanding of what the paper is trying to argue, and how they will proceed.

  • Highlight or underline key ideas in the paper. If you want to save some trees, you can also do this entirely online in PDFs.

  • Summarize the main ideas in the paper. Try explaining the main ideas and arguments to someone else, either in one paragraph of text or in 30 seconds speaking.

  • For empirical articles, concentrate on the tables and figures, since these represent the authors' main results. Then you can revisit the methods, to see how the authors arrived at their results, and the discussion, to see whether their interpretations of the results match your own.

Class Attendance and Participation

A good portion of the learning in any upper level class comes from intelligent discussion involving the instructor and the students. If you don't attend class, you cannot participate, and your performance in the class may reflect that. This portion of your grade will consist of:

  • The instructors knowing your face and name

  • Participating in in-class exercises

  • Asking interesting questions

  • Contributing to class discussion (think quality, not quantity)

We expect that each student will make an effort to attend all lectures and contribute constructively to the discussion. Do not use your laptop in class to read email, chat on IM or surf the web. Let us know in advance if you have interviews or trips to conferences. The instructors' judgment of your class participation will influence your final grade.

Show and Tell

All students in the 05-820 course should sign up to become an expert on some kind of social web site. Students should "lurk" on the social web site for a while to understand how things are done there, create an account (we have funds you can use if necessary), and try contributing to ongoing discussions or adding new content (if they are not members of the community already).
At some point in the semester, each student will make a brief 10-15 minute presentation about their selected web site ("show and tell"). The show and tell should have two components.  First, you should give an overview of the site and what makes it interesting.  Second, you should relate the site to one of the themes from the course.

  • Description

  •  

    • A brief overview and walk-through of the web site

    • Who is the target audience? How do they attract new members?

    • Take us through the site, give typical examples of how the site is used

    • How many members use the site, and what is their growth rate

    • What kind of culture has evolved? For example, common in-jokes, message board posting practices, handling trolls, shorthand notation, etc

    • What's the business model (if applicable)? For example, paid subscription, advertising, donations, etc

    • Who are their competitors? Think both offline and online (for example, competitors for eBay would also include Sotheby's and Christie's auction houses)

    • If moderated, how is it done? For example, by volunteers, by designated lieutenants, by the operators of the site, etc? Also, how are trolls handled?

    • How is new content created and filtered? Is it handled top-down by editors, bottom-up by members? How to sort the good from the mediocre?

    • What kinds of growing pains has the site faced? How has the site changed over time to adapt?

 

  • Relationship to course themes. How does this site relate to the week's topic or another topic discussed in class. For example,

    • For example, if we are talking about newbies, discuss how the site encourages newbies to join and contribute or the way it protects old-timers for ignorance or ill will newbies may have?

    • If we are talking about contribution, discuss the mechanisms the site uses to encourage contributions and evaluate how well they work.

    • If talking about technology, is there anything interesting about the underlying technology of the web site?  How does it handle problems of scale? How does it deal with concurrency control?

    • Overall, does the site work well? Why or why not?

Example show and tells (feel free to choose your own as well):

  • Second Life / Dark Age of Camelot / Everquest / Hello Kitty Online (social software with avatars)

  • Enterzon (a social game to teach Chinese language)

  • qq.com / bebo / friendster / orkut (social software with strong international components)

  • metafilter.com / reddit / digg / delicious (group blogs, social news, social bookmarking)

  • craigslist

  • Ask Yahoo / Ask Metafilter / (question answering sites)

  • Dodgeball / Socialight / myspace mobile / twitter (mobile social software)

  • Metacafe / vimeo (video sharing sites that aren't YouTube)

  • dailykos / redstate (social web sites focusing on politics)

  • Failed sites (e.g., Nupedia, Google Answers)

 

Course Project

Students will work on semester projects in groups of at most 4 that include students with a variety of areas of expertise. Project teams may have at most three students from the same department (e.g., the HCII)
Each project group will propose a project. Although your project can be on any topic related to the course, we anticipate there will be three main types of projects:

  1. The design and implementation of a social web site (i.e. an implementation-oriented project).

  2. A hypothesis,  implementation and evaluation to improve one or more facets of an existing social site (e.g., a focus experiment).

  3. An analysis of one or more existing social sites is able to gain insight into how those web sites are used or how they manage to be successful (i.e., an empirical analysis of an existing site). This analysis can either be quantitative (e.g., the role that physical location plays in a social networking site) or quantitative (e.g., the impact of a social support site on its members).

Groups with ideas for other types of projects should discuss them with the professors before submitting their project proposals.  A key element in any of these projects is to relate your work on these we are covering in course readings and discussion.
Here are the milestones for the project:

  • Sep 29: Propose a class project on the class forum, or provide feedback on someone else's project. This is Homework #4.

  • Sep 30: Present brief project ideas in class.

  • Oct 7: Turn project name and group member roster to class instructors. All team members should also go thru IRB training at http://phrp.nihtraining.com/users/login.php. This is Homework #6.

  • Oct 10: Each group submits a one-page project proposal to the course forums (we will create a thread for this). This is Homework #5.

  • Nov 4-5: Give a 10-15 minute progress report presentation .

  • Nov 7: Submit a written progress report to the course forums by November 7 (we will create a thread for this). Feel free to provide constructive feedback to other teams. If dealing with human subjects, should complete a mock IRB application ,with all necessary attachments and turn this in as part of  your interim report. This is Homework #8.

  • Dec 8th, 6PM-9PM (room to be announced): Give a 15-minute final project presentation.

  • Dec 14 (5 PM): Turn in final paper paper giving an overview of the proposed study, what you had hoped to learn from it, what you learned from the pilot study, etc. Either email it to Jason and Bob (if it is just a report) or create a CDs (if there is a lot of data or software). Your IRB forms, survey forms, etc. should be included as appendices.

Generally, implementation-oriented projects should go through a few iterations of lo-fidelity prototyping with target users before implementation. They should also have a few informal user studies to assess usability and utility of the implemented web site.
Note that we have some funds, if you need to purchase software, get a subscription to a web service, run user studies, etc.

Summary

Each student needs to:

  • Sign up to be a thread starter for 3 readings in the entire semester and start the threads by Sunday evening

  • Sign up to do at least one show and tell (if signed up for the 05-820 course)

  • Do a course project (with groups formed later in the semester)

Every week, each student needs to:

  • Do the course readings

  • Do any homeworks assigned for that week

  • Make at least 3 replies to the course forums

  • Rate at least 10 posts made by other people

  • Attend class and participate in discussion