Session 6--Online identity and interaction

Welcome back. I hope everyone had a fine spring break, and that you had at least some opportunity to get away from the computer ;).

These last two sessions will be dedicated to supporting your final projects. Those of you with some systems analysis or interaction design experience well understand the dangers of undertaking design and/or analysis without accounting for the actual people who design, maintain and use the system. In Session 6, you'll look at this from the perspective of two users of one of the social computing sites you're analyzing for your final project. In Session 7, the focus will shift to the people whose job it is to design and manage online interactions in these sites. The work you do in these last two sessions should plug directly into your final projects, both in terms of applying concepts from the readings and in supporting your observations.

Session 6, Week 1--complete by Sunday, April 5, 11:59pm

This session's readings provide a small sample of different online communities, different interaction modes, and different ways researchers have studied them. Common to most is a sense that the engine driving social computing is online identity. I think we can agree that online identity is something more than the sum of a person's username, avatar and the strings of text they post. But how do we know online identity when we see it? Addressing this question in a given online community is necessarily data-driven. Therefore, your task is to:

1. Propose a working definition of online identity for a site you are studying, and compare it to one or more of those found in the readings
   
2. Write two informal use scenarios based on your observations of existing users. Use scenarios are outlines of common interactions: how an individual with a predictable need enters your system, navigates through common decision points and options step by step, then (ideally) exits with what he or she came for. Include functional interactions (just user decision points relevant to the user's goal, you need not exhaustively list all options) and interpersonal interactions. Again, don't worry about formal scenario structure, just communicate the information. Here's a helpful overview: http://www.infodesign.com.au/usabilityresources/scenarios
   
3. Using the scenarios, address this question: how are online identities shaped and expressed through online interactions in this community? Your answer should be based on specific examples you observe (include at least one illustrative screenshot per scenario), and be as distinctive as possible. For example, on Answerbag, ratings are a component of one's online identity. But since everybody rates and is rated, you need more specific information to distinguish one person's identity from another's. One person might rate content positively 100% of the time, and another only 30%--that's the level of data detail necessary to ground claims about the online identity of the users depicted in your scenarios.
   

In anticipation of questions:

• People working in pairs should still make individual blog posts, though they can certainly be coordinated.
• If you're having trouble finding evidence of online identity in a given user, there's no need to force it. Many social computing sites have strong factual components, where interactions are essentially anonymous. Observations like this should help you conceptualize what online identity is in your site, and how it's expressed. Make those users and interactions the focus of your scenarios.
  
• If, despite your best efforts, you can't see a link between your site and this assignment, feel free to email me as always.

Session 6, Week 2--complete by Sunday, April 12, 11:59pm

Respond to at least five of your fellow students' posts. As I follow your comment threads, I am especially pleased to see you supporting and discussing each other's final projects. I think this kind of mutual support is the essence of social computing, and a strong argument to offer more online courses of this sort in the future.

Session 5--Social knowledge production and services

The deadline for submitting your final project proposals is upon us! Since part of the Session 4 assignment involved getting feedback on your proposals from other students, if you sent me a proposal more than a few days ago, please email me again with your final version by the deadline, Monday March 9. I'll do what I did last session and send you individual feedback and suggestions on your proposals over the next few days, and include any comments on your Session 4 posts. Sometimes I think you guys have freer and better conversations on your blog posts when I don't jump in anyway ;).

If you look at the description of this course, you'll notice it ends with the following:

"...compare them with traditional professional equivalents, and evaluate how these diverse perspectives can inform one another."

For Session 5, you'll be doing exactly this; applying some of the things you've learned about social computing to more traditional forms of information seeking and services.


Session 5, Week 1--complete by Sunday, Mar 15, 11:59pm

Choose one of the following general areas of comparison from this session's readings:

• Peer production in online environments vs. in-person collaboration
• Social tagging online vs. professional cataloging and classification
• Online social recommendation systems vs. real world advice seeking
• Social Q&A vs. libraries or schools

Then, making explicit reference to the readings and using specific examples with screenshots, discuss ways in which the forms of social and traditional knowledge production you chose can inform each other. Address both sides: for example, if you propose that a strength of Social Q&A can help address a weakness in traditional education, then also discuss how a strength of traditional education can improve a weakness of Social Q&A. Why do you think the two perspectives can benefit one other, and what would some tradeoffs be? Again, use specific examples to ground your points.

Some cautions: strive to make your analysis both actionable and non-obvious. Also, if you find yourself thinking that the two environments you've chosen are too different to be usefully compared, then choose others. Your goal is to identify examples of how social and traditional knowledge production and services can plausibly inform one another.


Session 5, Week 2--complete by Sunday, Mar 22, 11:59pm

Comment on at least 5 other students' posts. Also consider that in all of your final projects, a comparative aspect similar to the one you'll be making in this session will very likely strengthen your arguments, or at least provide some perspective from outside the realm of social computing. I suggest you read other students' posts, contribute comments and structure your final projects with that in mind.

After that, enjoy a well-earned week of Spring Break! But always feel free to email me if you have any questions about the course.

The Session 6 blog will go up on or about Monday Mar 30.