Required Reading for Wednesday and Thursday

For Wednesday, please read the Wired magazine article, The Rise of Crowdsourcing.

For Thursday, please read the sections from our handout reading on “Cyberspace” and “Governance”–pages 66 to 87.

Class for Friday 22 June

Yesterday I said that today we would continue our examination of Wikipedia and open source/collaborative production, but we will do that instead on Monday in order for people to have time to review material linked at yesterday’s entry.

Instead today we will have a work/consultation day. I recommend that you use the class time today to focus on your final project weblogs. At this point, each member of each group should have posted several entries. You should be building your community through the blogroll, trying to attract readers, etc. I will try to come to each group today to discuss how things are going with your project.

In addition: For your individual weblog assignment for today, post an entry to your site in which you try to engage in conversation with another student’s site (this may be an individual or group site). In other words, post an entry at your site discussing or extending an idea you see at someone else’s site (be sure to link to any entry you refer to). Your entry will be part of the material due for the second individual weblog review, which I will begin later today.

Open Source and Collaborative Production

“Open Source” and “Collaborative Production” are important concepts for understanding new information technologies and their relation to social networks. For our purposes, we can understand these as closely related terms describing social arrangements through which groups of people work together in order to create something.

The term open source is often used to refer to a method for creating and improving software, but has been applied more broadly to any kind of collaborative production process that attempts to keep restrictions on participation as limited as possible.

Today we will have a quick introduction to these concepts and we will look at one of the best-known examples of online collaborative production, Wikipedia.

For Monday, please:

• Explore the Wikipedia site;
• Read About Wikipedia;
• Read the Wikipedia article on Open Source;
• Read the Wikipedia article on Wikis

Promoting Your Site

Today in class we will have a play day – time to work on your project sites. Our focus today will be on building your community of readers by promoting your site. The internet is a big place and you will need to put some attention into building your profile in order to make it easier for people to find your site.

• From your WordPress dashboard, look at “blog stats” to get an idea of who is using your site.
• Be sure that WordPress makes your blog visible to search engines: From your dashboard, click Options and then Privacy, and then select “I would like my blog to appear in search engines…” and click “update options”.
• Also in WordPress, under Options, Discussion, select all of the first three options under “usual settings for an article”. Under “before a comment appears” be sure that “an administrator must approve” is not checked, then click “update options”.
• Be sure that Google is listing your site. Visit About Google for links to find if your site is listed, how to submit your URL, etc.
• Get in the habit of linking to other sites and of asking people at other sites to link to you. One way search engines rank pages (i.e. decide which sites come first when search results are returned) is to examine the links among sites. Start by asking your colleagues in the class to link to your site from their sites.
• Post frequently; more frequent posting generally raises search ranking results.
• When you post entries, use links to material you refer to and make sure that the text of your link uses a term that actually helps describe the material you are linking to. In other words, if you link to the neweurasia site. Do it this way: neweurasia.net. Don’t do it this way: this site. Google prefers links that are descriptive of what they link to.
• Try to think creatively of how you can boost your site’s popularity, even just a bit. Email friends and family and ask them to look at your site; If any of them have websites or weblogs, ask them to link to your site; As you develop your site, look for sites that address similar issues or topics–link to those sites, and ask the site owners to consider linking to your site as well.

That’s probably enough for today. We will do more of this in coming days.

In Class Today: 18 June

In class today, groups will make presentations based on last Thursday’s in class activity. As each group presents, everyone in class should follow along with their computers, exploring the sites each group examined.

Tomorrow we will review the midterm. Remember the reading that is also due for tomorrow, the chapter on community in the handout you got at the beginning of the term.

Reminder on Final Projects

We have now been working on the final project weblogs for one week (just a bit more, actually). Though this doesn’t seem like much time, it means that 25% of the time dedicated to your project has passed, and you should have done 25% of the work for the project by now. At this point you should have:

• Formed project groups;
• Chosen one or more topics for the project;
• Identified and begun to use several sources of information;
• Created your project weblog and given all group members publishing permission;
• Posted the names of group members and the URL (web address) of your project site as a comment to this entry;
• Each member of the group should have posted three entries relevant to the project on the project weblog.

If you have not done all these tasks so far, then you are behind on the project and should immediately do so.  Please ask me if you have any questions.

Required Reading for Tuesday 19 June

For Tuesday please read the material on “community” in the handout you received at the beginning of the term.

Reminder about final projects

By now you should have done the following:

• Formed your final project group
• Decided on the topic(s) for your weblog
• Set up the project weblog and given account access to all group members
• Posted the web address as a comment on this entry
• Begun posting material to your group site (an average of three entries per week starting 11 June)

IF there is any of the above you have not yet done, please do so immediately. I will be posting a bit more information on this entry as well…

Midterm Reminder

Don’t forget: we meet on Friday 15 June in 221 Valikhanov for the midterm.

In-Class Activity: Participatory Journalism and Web Communities

(Note: If you were absent for this class, you will need to do a similar exercise on your own for another news site. Please speak to me about it.)

In class today we will begin an activity in which we examine news oriented websites in order to learn about their communities. This is a group exercise. Each group will be assigned a site to look at in detail. Your task is to try to understand the site not simply as a set of pages, links, and so forth, but as a socio-technical network that enables and promotes community participation. The question each group will use in their exploration is: “How does this site promote community and what is that community like?”

Here are a few specific guidelines to use as you try to answer this question:

• Tools: What specific tools does the site use to promote community? (Review We Media, chapter 4 for ideas.)
• Self-Description: How does this site present itself to the world? You may find in a site’s self-description (for example, in an “About” page) some evidence about the kind of community they hope to promote.
• Networking: Follow outgoing links from the site and see what kind of community that site is developing using those links. What does this suggest to you?
• Participation: What can you discover about who actually uses the site, how they use it, and why? What are the rules of participation? Is there a hierarchy in the community? If so, how much control do those at the top of the hierarchy seem to have over those at the bottom. Is the site delivering information to an audience? Or is it promoting conversation? How participatory is this journalism site?

I suggest that each group split up the pieces of this exercise so each participant looks at one specific question (overlap is okay). I will consult with groups today as they investigate their sites.

For one of next week’s individual weblog entries, each participant should have one entry of a couple of paragraphs or so focusing on your part of the exercise and linking to other members of your group.

If time permits today, we will discuss in class what you are finding. Otherwise we will have this discussion next Monday.

The sites for exploration (groups TBA in class) are:

1. neweurasia.net (Yulia, Kristina, Nataliya M., Victoria)
2. The New York Times (Sadyk, Yekaterina V., Zarina, Dauren)
3. OhMyNews (Sagydnyk, Akina, Anasstasiya)
4. The Guardian (Murager, Aliya, Semyon)
5. Baristanet (Aizhana, Vadim, Maks, Natalya S.)