Si529w09 - Overview
Analysis and Design of Online Communities
Sessions and Notes
- Introduction
- Niches; Ethics
- Conversation and other Activities
From the Drupal site for the course...
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 communities.
The course prepares students for roles as online community designers and managers. Each 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 or refine design claims.
