Course Overview

This course is intended to help students to analyze online interaction environments with an eye toward design. For the purpose of this course, a community is defined as a group of people who sustain interaction over time. The group may be held together by a common identity, a collective purpose, or merely by the individual utility gained from the interactions. An online interaction environment is an electronic forum, accessed through computers or other electronic devices, in which community members can conduct some or all of their interactions. We will use the term eCommunity as shorthand, both for communities that conduct all of their interactions online and for communities that use on-line interaction to supplement face-to-face interactions.

The course connects social science theories with the goals of online community managers and with with the alternative social and technical design alternatives available to them. The central construct is the design claim: Alternative X will help/hinder the achievement of goal Y, in contexts Z. Such claims will be supported by empirical evidence from lab and field experiments, or from observational studies of naturally occurring behavior in extant online communitites.

The master's version of the course prepares students for roles as online community designers and managers. Each master's student will pick an online community to observe throughout the semester. Each student will document social and technical features and assess their impact on various design goals, thus providing case studies to support design claims.

The doctoral "shadow" course, 884, prepares students to conduct research on on-line communities. Each doctoral student will formulate design claims that are supported by theories, and design empirical assessments that would support or counter the claims.

Logistics

Meets Mondays 1-4PM in Room 412WH

Professor Paul Resnick
3246C SI North Office Hours: Fridays 1-5PM, 409WH (Hacker Jam)
presnick@umich.edu

GSI John Lin
Outside of 3250 SI North
Office Hours: Tuesdays, 5pm to 6pm
johnclin@umch.edu

Course Objectives

(684) At the end of this course, a student should be able to:

• identify the major social and technical elements of an online community and, drawing on relevant social science theories, understand the implications of specific design choices on the community;
• guide an on-line community through the startup phase and the selection and configuration of new social and technical features and activities.

(884) At the end of this course, a student should:

• have a grounding in research on online communities and some relevant underlying social science theories;
• understand who some of the key researchers are in this area, what research communities are interested in online communities, and why;
• be able to form a research question about online communities, select an appropriate method to answer that question, know who is looking into similar questions, and know where to publish the results of your research.

Pre-requisites

SI 502, which provides an introduction to the technologies of networked computing. Vocabulary and concepts such as "API" and "mashup" will be used freely in this course. In addition, students need to know what kinds of tools are available to support distributed, synchronous and asynchronous communication (e.g., chat, instant messaging, message boards, audio and video conferencing, live application sharing). Students who are unfamiliar with these but are comfortable learning new technologies on their own will have the opportunity to explore these at their own pace. This course will spend very little time explicitly teaching about technology, but will frequently assume it as background.

Texts

We'll be reading excerpts from a large number of books and articles. Generally, links to electronic copies are provided (to students logged into the site, not to anonymous users). Some optional readings listed in the syllabus are not provided-- you'llhave to track those down yourself based on the reference provided inthe syllabus.

We'll be reading large portions of the following books, and you may want to acquire them for more handy reference.

• Wenger, Etienne, McDermott and Snyder (2001). Cultivating Communities of Practice (Amazon link) . [Note: we will also read excerpts from "Communities of Practice, 1998", which is a denser, more scholarly treatment. Doctoral students are especially encouraged to acquire and read the 1998 book
• Powazek, Derek (2001) Design for Community (Out of print)
• Kim, Amy Jo (2000) Community Building on the Web (Out of print)

Class Activities

Each week there will be assigned readings. Our engagement with these assigned readings will begin on-line, before the class session for which they're assigned, and continue in class.We will engage in four ways:

• Description: statements or questions about what the author claims.
• Critique: arguments about whether the author is correct or what the author has left out.
• Connection:how the claims or concepts relate to those in other readings.
• Application: how the reading applies to the communities we are studying.

The first three, description, critique, and connection, will occur in threaded commentary on the website entry for the reading. One student will be assigned to kick off the online discussion for each reading, by Tuesady at noon. Online discussion will continue through Thursday at midnight. Each student is expected to contribute to the thread discussing each reading. In class on Monday, I will give a brief lecture highlighting key points from the readings and discussion.

The final mode of engagement, application, will begin through weekly student blog entries about how the readings for the week apply to their selected communities. There is one required blog entry per week, not one per reading. The entry should be posted by Thursday at midnight. Based on the blog entries, we will select several students each week to present in class the application of the week's course concepts to their communities. Selected students will be notified by Friday at 5PM. Student presentations should last approximately three minutes and focus on just one or two key ideas. Screenshots may be shown, but not text PowerPoint. Expect seven minutes of Q&A on each presentation.

There is a voting mechanism. Especially highly rated comments and blog posts will appear on the front page of the site. Writers of popular entries will attain glory, (not so) valuable prizes, and probably good grades as well, though the connection between popularity and good grades will be filtered through the critical faculties of the professor (in other words, I'll make my own judgement about which posts are especially good, but my attention may be drawn to those that gain acclaim from your peers.)

This is a 3-credit course, so you should expect to spend, on average, 12 hours per week on the course, over the course of the 14 week semester. Here's my approximate estimate of how that time would be split up:

• required reading (3 hours)
• class time (3 hours)
• weekly online discussion and blog entries (2 hours)
• major assignments (4 hours/week averaged over the term)

Assignments

684 students willl have the following assignments:

• See weekly assignments related to class activities above
• Make an edit on wikipedia (by January 24)
• Descriptive summary (5-7 pages) of the community you've chosen to study (due Feb. 4)
• Three short papers (5-7 pages) assessing design claims with respect to your community:
  • Design claim related to inter-group relations or regulating behavior (due Feb. 18)
  • Design claim related to selecting and integrating newcomers (due March 17)
  • Design claim related to motivating contribution (due April 7; NOW APRIL  14)
• Design a rollout plan for a new community. 5-7 pages (due April 18; NOW APRIL 21)

884 students will have the following assignments:

• See weekly assignments related to class activities above
• Make an edit on wikipedia (by January 24)
• Three short papers (5-7 pages), each presenting a theory-inspired design claim and a sketch of a proposal for research that would yield evidence supporting or refuting the claim
  • Design claim related to inter-group relations or regulating behavior (due Feb. 18)
  • Design claim related to selecting and integrating newcomers (due March 17)
  • Design claim related to motivating contribution (due March 31-- note, one week earlier than 684 students)
• Full research proposal expanding on one of the three shorter papers (due April 18).

Grading

Everyone

• Online discussion of readings, 15%
• Wikipedia assignment, 5%

684 students

• Online blog entries, 5%
• Community description, 5%
• In-class presentations, 10%
• Four short design papers, 15% each

884 students:

• Three short proposal sketches: 10% each
• Critiques of other students' sketches: 10%
• Final full proposal: 40%