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.