Social Computing

Overview

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People are social creatures and the modern Internet reflects that. Technology has made collaboration at a distance possible in new ways that present their own set of challenges. This course will introduce you to the major challenges and opportunities for creating online communities. What does the future hold? Learn how social computing can create collaboration experiences that go beyond what’s possible face to face.

Syllabus

Connecting People through Technology

When you think of social media, you might think of a popular social network, like Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. These are indeed powerful, but the universe of social media is much larger. Both online and off, most everything we do has a social component that is mediated by some technology. After all, technologies have been helping people communicate since long before your favorite curly-haired CEO dropped out of college. In this module, you’ll learn about different types of social software, how to think about physical collaboration and digital collaboration using the same framework, and what the challenges to success for collaborative software are.

Challenges & Opportunities of Collaboration Online

In our always-on, pervasively connected world, it can seem as if space and distance don’t matter anymore. Indeed, more and more organizations are outsourcing work around the globe and/or opening satellite locations. But being instantly reachable from anywhere in the world, isn’t the same as being there. In this module, you’ll learn the ways that distance does and doesn’t matter, how to design for this reality and how to create technologies that go beyond being there.

Crowdsourcing

It can’t possibly work, can it? Slice up challenging problems into tiny pieces, distribute them to people all over the planet, and then gather their responses to piece together a solution. In this module, you’ll learn both the possibilities and limits of crowdsourcing. You’ll learn strategies for being able to use crowdsourcing successfully, and even hear from the voice of a professional crowdworker about what makes it successful from a worker’s perspective. To gain deeper intuitions, you’ll get to try it out yourself in the assignment.