IGERT Proposal Materials – Social Computing http://socialcomputing.ucsb.edu UCSB Social Computing Group Web Site Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:59:13 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.4.2 Proposed Social Computing IGERT Curriculum http://socialcomputing.ucsb.edu/?p=97 Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:33:08 +0000 http://socialcomputing.ucsb.edu/?p=97

Social Computing IGERT Curriculum

[Also see sample syllabus and bibliography for SC 2.a – Social Computing Advanced Research Core Course]
Tech & Society PH.D Emphasis Social Computing IGERT Courses
(on top of Tech & Society Ph.D. Emphasis Curriculum)
Year 1
1.a – Gateway Seminar for UCSB Technology & Society Ph.D. Emphasis.

Rationale: This course introduces students to a broad range of methods and topics in the study of information technology and society.  It also links up students with wide selection of faculty and other students and teaches them how to collaborate across disciplines.

SC 1.a – Social Computing Research Skills and Methods Course

Rationale: This course provides hands-on introductions and training in the research and technological skills needed to collaborate across disciplines on topics related to social computing.  The course ensures that students are cross-trained in other disciplines at a level adequate to facilitate later collaboration.  Major units of the course will include: introduction to social-science research methods and social-networking theory and tools; introduction to networking technology, database theory, datamining, and visualization [I need some help here!]; introduction to cultural and ethnical analysis, including contemporary approaches to human identity.
1.b – Two of the four courses required for the Tech & Society Ph.D. Emphasis (1 in T&S Area 1: Culture and History; 1 in T&S Area 2: Society and Behavior)

Rationale: These courses expose students to the breadth of the topic of technology and society.

Example courses from approved T&S list:

Area 1: “Historicizing New Media,” “Digital Media Theory & Practices,” “Race & Gender in Cyberculture,” “Technology in U.S. History,” “Network Protocols in a Social Context”

Area 2: “Mass Communication and the Individual,” “Global Organizational Communication,” “Technology & Organization,” “Literacy in the Information Age,” “Geographic Information Systems,” “Internet & Social Movements,” “Information Technology & Politics”

 SC 1.b

At least one additional core course in a student’s home department relevant to, or preparatory for, work on social computing.

Rationale: These courses anchor the new student in their home program and ensure a sound basis for future work integrating their dissertation research with their social computing IGERT research.

Example courses:

Sociology: Soc 224: “Social Movements”; Soc 294: “The Internet and Social Movements”; Soc 294: “Methods of Internet Research”

Communication: Comm 594: “Social Media and Communication”

Media Arts & Technology/Humanities: “Technology and the New Sociology of Culture”

Computer Science: [We need something here]
Year 2
2.a

The last two of four courses required for the Tech & Society Ph.D. Emphasis (1 in T&S Area 1: Culture and History; 1 in T&S Area 2: Society and Behavior)

Rationale & Example Courses: (See under 1.b above)

SC 2.a – Social Computing Advanced Research Core Course

Rationale: this course includes advanced readings and discussions of with units on the application of social computing (including collective action); information, communication, and media studies (including information credibility); and the development and measurement of social-computing technology.  [Detailed syllabus and bibliography]
SC 2.b – Project Design Course

Rationale: This is a team-based project-design course in which students design and prototype a project for the purpose of exploring next-generation social, cultural, and technological issues in social computing.  Students will be supervised by a faculty member experienced in project-design and -management (who will also mentor students in such professionalization topics as grant-writing, project-administration, project-budgeting, and human-studies ethics rules); and each student will also consult with an individual advisor in his or her home department to ensure that there is synergy between IGERT research and dissertation research.

Year 3

[Outside the IGERT, students in this year focus on their dissertation prospectuses and final qualifying exams in their home departments]

 SC 3.a – Social Collaboratory Project Course

Rationale: This course brings the results of our IGERT students’ training to bear on one of the great user-bases of social computing: K-12 and undergraduates.  The purpose is to help educate younger students in the nature, potential, and risks of social media and also to encourage them to pursue educational tracks that will help produce tomorrow’s social-computing designers, engineers, content-managers, scholars, critics, and others.   IGERT students in this collaboratory are required to build a team-based project that interacts with K-12 and/or undergraduate students.  The project will be evaluated on the basis of two criteria: ability to make society aware of the broad social, cultural, and technological implications of social media; and ability to make younger students aware of the specific training they would need to have a career in social computing in the future (i.e., a sense of the professional “fields” involved, the programs they may want to find out about, etc.).
Ongoing Professionalization Training
Besides the mentoring specified under 2.b above, students will be required to undergo a structured series of activities intended to provide them with professionalization training.  Due to space limitations, these are omitted from this preproposal, but will be included in a full proposal.  These activities include: attendance at a lecture series, an annual research review, a formal mentoring arrangement, an ethics and human-subjects workshop, a public research talk, and a management/entrepreneurship workshop.  The IGERT, of course, also includes the requirement that students undergo a critique of their Ph.D. prospectus and a dissertation defense (in conjunction with the requirements of a student’s disciplinary department ).
]]> Social Computing Advanced Research Core Course http://socialcomputing.ucsb.edu/?p=111 Wed, 10 Mar 2010 09:21:18 +0000 http://socialcomputing.ucsb.edu/?p=111 SC 2.a – Syllabus
The following is an example syllabus for the second-year core course in a social computing IGERT. The references suggest example readings.

Week 1 & 2: Introduction
Social computing is the study of large-scale socially aware information systems. Current technologies span social networking sites (e.g., Facebook), media sharing sites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr), collaborative knowledge production (e.g., Wikipedia) and mapping sites (e.g., mashups).  Developing a disciplined understanding of social computing, however, is an inherently interdisciplinary task requiring research and training across a spectrum of fields – including engineering, sociology, education, the humanities, communication, design, the arts, and media studies (Liu et al., 2008). Have these technologies changed our social attitudes and behaviors? How has social computing altered problems of collective action and information credibility? What research methods are effective in studying these phenomena? We start by defining social computing (Wang et al., 2007) and discussing Web 2.0 visions (O’Reilly, 2005; Rheingold, 2000; Brown and Duguid, 2002). We discuss how open-source software and collaborative knowledge production might be described as a new mode of economic production – described as non-market social production by Benkler (2006) or more generally as digital commons (Greco and Floridi, 2004). What are the theoretical ideas behind technology diffusion into society? We discuss utopian and dystopian visions, and technological determinism and social shaping of technology (Bimber, 1994; Mackay and Gillespie, 1992; Kling, 1996).

Week 3 & 4: Technology
We start by discussing the nature of theWeb and its behavioral and structural complexities (Adamic and Huberman, 2001; Albert et al., 1999; Fielding and Taylor, 2002). We review several key technologies and discuss their architecture and design:

  • Blogging (Kumar et al., 2004);
  • Collaborative filtering (Kautz et al., 1997) and tagging (Sen et al., 2006;  Golder and Huberman, 2006; Halpin et al., 2007);
  • Internet search (Barroso et al., 2003);
  • Social media and networking sites (Boyd and Ellison, 2007); and
  • Wikipedia and wikis (Priedhorsky et al., 2007; Almeida et al., 2007).

Week 5 & 6: Behavior

  • Free-riding problems (Adar and Huberman, 2000; Beenen et al., 2004).
  • Motivations and social psychology (Nardi et al., 2004).
  • Online credibility (Metzger et al., 2003; Metzger, 2007; Rieh and Danielson, 2007).
  • Social impacts (Katz and Rice, 2002; Kavanaugh et al., 2005).
  • Social roles in online environments (Golder and Donath, 2004; Suler, 2004).

Week 7 & 8: Culture

  • Authoring (Pfeil et al., 2006; Emigh and Herring, 2005).
  • Globalization (Axford, 2004).
  • Historical perspectives.
  • Social presence (Schroeder, 2002).
  • Virtual communities (Bakardjieva, 2003).

Week 9 & 10: Policy

  • Intellectual property (Mitchell, 2005).
  • Privacy (Gross et al., 2005).

References

  • Adamic, L. A. and B. A. Huberman (2001). The web’s hidden order. Communications of the ACM 44(9), 55–60.
  • Adar, E. and B. A. Huberman (2000). Free riding on gnutella. First Monday 5(10)
  • Albert, R., H. Jeong, and A.-L. Barab´asi (1999). Internet: Diameter of the world-wide web. Nature 401(6749), 130–131.
  • Almeida, R., B. Mozafari, and J. Cho (2007). On the evolution of Wikipedia. In 1st International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, Boulder, CO.
  • Axford, B. (2004). Global civil society or ‘networked globality’: beyond the territorialist and societalist paradigm. Globalizations 1(2), 249–264.
  • Bakardjieva, M. (2003). Virtual Togetherness: An Everyday-life Perspective. Media, Culture & Society 25(3), 291.
  • Barroso, L. A., J. Dean, and U. Holzle (2003). Web search for a planet: The Google cluster architecture. IEEE Micro 23(2), 22–28.
  • Beenen, G., K. Ling, X. Wang, K. Chang, D. Frankowski, P. Resnick, and R. E. Kraut (2004). Using social psychology to motivate contributions to online communities. In ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Chicago, Illinois, USA.
  • Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
  • Bimber, B. A. (1994). The three faces of technological determinism. In M. R. Smith and L. Marx (Eds.), Does technology drive history? The dilemma of technological determinism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
  • Boyd, D. M. and N. Ellison (2007). Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 13(1).
  • Brown, J. S. and P. Duguid (2002). The Social Life of Information. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press.
  • Emigh, W. and S. C. Herring (2005). Collaborative authoring on the web: A genre analysis of online encyclopedias. In 38th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS ’05), Waikoloa, Hawaii.
  • Fielding, R. T. and R. N. Taylor (2002). Principled design of the modern Web architecture. ACM Transactions on Internet Technology 2(2), 115–150.
  • Golder, S. and J. Donath (2004, 19-22 September). Social roles in electronic communities. In Association of Internet Researchers Conference: Internet Research 5.0, Brighton, England.
  • Golder, S. A. and B. A. Huberman (2006). Usage patterns of collaborative tagging systems. Journal of Information Science 32(2), 198–208.
  • Greco, G. M. and L. Floridi (2004). The tragedy of the digital commons. Ethics and Information Technology 6(2), 73–81. doi:10.1007/s10676-004-2895-2.
  • Gross, R., A. Acquisti, and H. J. Heinz, III (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. In ACM Workshop on Privacy in the Electronic Society, Alexandria, VA, pp. 71–80.
  • Halpin, H., V. Robu, and H. Shepherd (2007). The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging. In 16th International Conference on World Wide Web, Banff, Alberta, Canada.
  • Katz, J. E. and R. E. Rice (2002). Social consequences of Internet use: Access, involvement, and interaction. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Kautz, H., B. Selman, and M. Shah (1997). Referral Web: Combining social networks and collaborative filtering. Communications of the ACM 40(3), 63–65.
  • Kavanaugh, A. L., D. D. Reese, J. M. Carroll, and M. B. Rosson (2005). Weak ties in networked communities. The Information Society 21(2), 119–131.
  • Kling, R. (1996). Hopes and horrors: Technological utopianism and anti-utopianism in narratives of computerization. In R. Kling (Ed.), Computerization and controversy: Value conflicts and social choices (2nd ed.)., pp. 40–58. San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann.
  • Kumar, R., J. Novak, P. Raghavan, and A. Tomkins (2004). Structure and evolution of blogspace. Communications of the ACM 47(12), 35–39.
  • Liu, A. et al. (2008). Social computing group. UCSB.
  • Mackay, H. and G. Gillespie (1992). Extending the social shaping of technology approach: Ideology and appropriation. Social Studies of Science 22(4),  685–716.
  • Metzger, M. J. (2007). Making sense of credibility on the web: Models for evaluating online information and recommendations for future research. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58(13), 2078–2091. doi:10.1002/asi.20672.
  • Metzger, M. J., A. J. Flanagin, K. Eyal, D. R. Lemus, and R. M. McCann (2003). Credibility for the 21st century: Integrating perspectives on source, message, and media credibility in the contemporary media environment.  Communication Yearbook 27(1), 293–335.
  • Mitchell, H. C. (2005). The intellectual commons: Toward an ecology of intellectual property. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
  • Nardi, B. A., D. J. Schiano, M. Gumbrecht, and L. Swartz (2004). Why we blog. Communications of the ACM 47(12), 41–46.
  • O’Reilly, T. (2005, 30 September). What is web 2.0: Design patterns and business models for the next generation of software. Online article.
  • Pfeil, U., P. Zaphiris, and C. S. Ang (2006). Cultural differences in collaborative authoring of Wikipedia. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 12(1).
  • Priedhorsky, R., J. Chen, S. T. K. Lam, K. Panciera, L. Terveen, and J. Riedl (2007). Creating, destroying, and restoring value in Wikipedia. In 6th International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP’07), Sanibel Island, FL. ACM.
  • Rheingold, H. (2000). The virtual community: Homesteading on the electronic frontier (2nd ed.). Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
  • Rieh, S. Y. and D. Danielson (2007). Credibility: A multidisciplinary framework. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 41, 307–364.
  • Schroeder, R. (2002). The Social Life of Avatars: Presence and Interaction in Shared Virtual Environments. New York: Springer.
  • Sen, S., S. K. Lam, A. M. Rashid, D. Cosley, D. Frankowski, J. Osterhouse, F. M. Harper, and J. Riedl (2006). tagging, communities, vocabulary, evolution. In 20th Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Banff, Alberta, Canada, pp. 181–190.
  • Suler, J. (2004). The online disinhibition effect. CyberPsychology andBehavior 7(3), 321–326.
  • Wang, F.-Y., K. M. Carley, D. Zeng, andW. Mao (2007). Social computing: From social informatics to social intelligence. IEEE Intelligent Systems 22(2), 79–83.
Syllabus originally prepared for the UCSB Social Computing Group’s IGERT proposal by Darren Hardy, member of the group’s “Bluesky” subgroup
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