Social Computing Philosophy and Tools: An Overview

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Social Computing Philosophy and Tools An
Overview

• Johannes Strobel, PhD
• Engineering Education Educational Technology
  Purdue University

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAl
ike 2.5 License
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Agenda

• Web 2.0(3.0) or history of it
• Humanizing Framework My ideological stance
• Three projects
• Learning history in 2.0 fashion
• Shaping San Francisco Social computing in
  1994 (project in search of technology)
• Life-stories of Montrealers displaced by
  atrocities Social computing 2009

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A little bit of History - Internet and Web

• Internet since 1962/65 Arpanet
• 1972 Internet goes public
• 1973 75 of internet was e-mail
• 1982 TCP/IP standard
• WWW
• 1989 concept (CERN)
• 1990 first browser/editor (HTML)
• 1994 Hotmail starts web based email
• 1996 Mirabilis (Israel) starts ICQ
• 1998 Google is founded

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Flickr is a social network for sharing photos.
My contacts tags are available to me
Flickr shows me photos from my network
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Del.icio.us is a Site that Uses a Folksonomy to
Organize Bookmarks
Tags Descriptive words applied by users to
links. Tags are searchable
My Tags Words Ive used to describe links in a
way that makes sense to me
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Wikipedia is a Collaborative Encyclopedia Being
Edited in Realtime
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Blogging is the Most Recognized Example of Web 2.0
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Social Networks Connect Users into Communities of
Trust (or interests)
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What is RSS? ? What RSS does?
YOU
New feed content pulled back into reader
RSS Reader
http//
Reader pings to check if feed (page/site) has
been updated)
Titles Dates Links Authors Content
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Blogs
Wikis
Newly tagged sites
New blog entries
Wiki updates
Podcasts
iTunes
iPod
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Most interesting Web 2.0 technology Linkback

• 1. Refback
• 2. Trackback
• 3. Pingback
• Reciprocal links ? Network and web-building
  feature without much effort.
• When someone links to one of my posts, my post
  links back to them (Tom Coates)
• (Semi-) Automatically
• Manually

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Humanizing framework of educational technology
Together with colleague Heather Tillberg-Webb
"We shape our buildings media/technology, and
afterwards our buildings media/technology shape
us." - Winston Churchill
How do we teach?
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Social Computing culture, (or how to blog)

• truth telling
• Honesty
• Transparency
• Human connection
• Acknowledging mistakes / Apologizing
• Removing the mask
• Share control
• Engaging in conversation without controlling the
  communication.

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Lets look even closer

• Audience as writers
• Mode of learning/living
• Participation
• Social Presence
• Trust and Reputation

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Audience as writers / students as teachers

• Different genres when we engage in private/public
  space
• Genres are fluid
• A blog is a blog is a blog
• Who are the teachers/writers?
• The teacher is finding her learners
• The learners are creating the teacher
• The audience is writing the blog

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Mode of learning/living

• Design curriculum by learners
• Input of students into course design
• Citizen Student (University as Society)
• Different Interests ? Different Pathways in
  classes?
• Window to connect and customize interaction with
  surroundings

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Participation / Community of practice

• Re-evaluation of lurking or peripheral
  participation
• The most frequent writers in online
  discussionboards spend 95 of their time reading
  (Lakhani et al. 2005)
• Acknowledging and valuing different participants
• Social types - Socialites, Trolls
• Article types - Worker Bees
• Policy types - Police, Judges
• Controversy lovers - Moths
• Pseudo-users - Vandals
• Extra-Wiki - Mailing list, IRC, Board activities,
  Developers (List by Jimmy Wales)

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lurkers
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Social Presence

• Social presence, initially proposed by Short,
  Williams, and Christie (1976) as technical
  social presence,
• was defined as the capacity of the medium itself
  to present the salience of the other person in
  interpersonal interaction
• Redefining social presence as the degree to
  which a person is perceived as real in mediated
  communication. Indicators
• Affective responses
• Cohesive responses
• Interactive responses

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Trust and Reputation

• 99 of eBay users have 99 positive rating
• Massive abuse and ineffectiveness
• Authority
• Open Source mode
• Membership/Belonging defined by actions not
  status or fees
• Legitimacy
• Credibility

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What does this mean for Education?

• Teachers as guides through existing jungle of
  information
• Becoming teachers in non-controlled environments
  (informal)
• Building networks and relationships
• Being present in both
• Products (quality, professional)
• Processes (messy, amateurish, quick)
• How we teach as important as what

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Project 1 Learning History

• Context American History of Religion Class,
  undergraduate students
• CrissCrossing (based on Cognitive Flexibility
  Theory), a web-based environment that enables
• Instructor created cases/perspectives/themes.
• Authoring capabilities for the students to create
  own cases/perspectives/themes.
• Linking capabilities between different documents.

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Criss-crossing
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Limitations of system

• Problems with Design of Cognitive Flexibility
  Hypertexts
• Missing ownership
• Passive system -gt limited system
• Sharing resources and engagement outside the
  system
• Shift to Participatory Design
• Involve the ones who are affected by the
  technology in the design of it) (Törpel, 2005)
• Computers as intellectual partners not as
  glorified teachers
• Learners as designers
• Instructional Designers learned more by designing
  CAI software then learners probably ever learn by
  interacting with the software (Jonassen et al.,
  1993)
• Teach-back literature (Johnson Johnson, 1987)

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Criss-crossing
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Project 1 Questions/Data

• Research Questions
• How does inquiry-based learning support
  conceptual change in a historically oriented
  class?
• How do students perform research in history when
  they are guided with a structure that presents
  and allows the writing of multiple perspectives
  on different cases in American History of
  Religion?
• Data
• 780 Essays written by 65 students (12 per
  student)
• Two interviews with 21 students transfer case
  and perception of learning/knowledge
  (epistemological beliefs)
• Methodologies
• Inductive Grounded Theory (Strauss Corbin)

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Project 1 Results
Layers of conceptual difficulties 1) Struggle
with complex question of What happened
students looking for authoritative sources 2)
Struggle with the interpretation and continuous
importance of events around the question What
was (or is still) going on? 3) Struggle with
data and interpretation historical accounts are
narratives, so meaning is situated in historical
context 4) Struggle with existing ontologies
(Religion) Development of new ontologies in the
core of conceptual development Interaction of
personal beliefs 1) Personal convictions provided
a cap for conceptual development 2) Personal
convictions of presence were imposed on the
past 3) Relativistic interpretations of the past
and present 4) Conflicts between personal
convictions and political correctness
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Project 2 Shaping San Francisco

• Social computing in 1994 (project in search of
  technology)

Shaping San Francisco is an ongoing multimedia
project in bottom-up, participatory history...
recovering lost history and sharing the story of
daily life in the City by the Bay.
Shaping San Francisco http//www.shapingsf.org/
New wiki http//foundsf.org/
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Project 2 Shaping San Francisco

• History (1994 now)
• Activist project
• Cast of hundreds (40 writers)
• 1266 pages

Jimmy Nolan, Chris Carlsson, Jimmy Davis
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Project 2 Shaping San Francisco
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Project 3 Life-stories

• Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by War,
  Genocide and Other Human Rights Violations
• Funded SSHRC, Canada (CURA Community
  University Research Alliance) 5 years (2007 - )
• Lead Concordia University (Centre for Oral
  History and Digital Storytelling)
• Partner 22 university-based researchers
• 18 community partner organizations
• Goal 600 stories accessible through
  participatory media
• How can their stories of violence and
  displacement most effectively be represented and
  communicated to a wider public?

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Project 3 Life stories
http//lifestoriesmontreal.ca/en/home-accueil

• Partner NFB, Canada Citizenshift
• (http//citizen.nfb.ca/)

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Thank you
QUESTIONS? Johannes Strobel, Ph.D. Engineering
Education Educational Technology Purdue
University jstrobel_at_purdue.edu