CNJ595: Social Media — Communication, Community, and Literacy

Uni­ver­sity of Miami — School of Com­mu­ni­ca­tion
CNJ595: Web 2.0: Social Media: Com­mu­ni­ca­tion, Com­mu­nity, and Lit­er­acy
Spring Semes­ter 2010

SYLLABUS

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND PURPOSE:

In a few short years, social media has pro­foundly changed the online com­mu­ni­ca­tion land­scape. With the advent of new tools and plat­forms, more and more peo­ple are pub­lish­ing and par­tic­i­pat­ing in con­ver­sa­tions online. Mass adop­tion of social com­put­ing tech­nolo­gies has led to new types of medi­ated inter­ac­tion as peo­ple main­tain more rela­tion­ships than any time prior.

As for­mer mem­bers of the audi­ence become the cre­ators of con­tent, cor­po­ra­tions and media orga­ni­za­tions lose con­trol of their mar­ket­ing mes­sage and indi­vid­u­als face new chal­lenges in terms of pri­vacy, iden­tity, and the main­te­nance of vir­tual relationships.

After an overview of how we got here, this course explores these oppor­tu­ni­ties and chal­lenges across a num­ber of dis­ci­plines and technologies.

This course is grounded in prac­tice, and you will be required to par­tic­i­pate in social net­works, forums, blogs, wikis, micro-blogs, and more. Class dis­cus­sions, pre­sen­ta­tions by stu­dents, read­ings, and exam­ples of emerg­ing tech­nolo­gies and media will bring us greater under­stand­ing of the issues, evo­lu­tion, and prac­tice of social media. We will also learn from case stud­ies, invited speak­ers, and our own learn­ing jour­nals, new effec­tive strate­gies and appli­ca­tions of these platforms.

The class is highly par­tic­i­pa­tory both offline and online. Between the weekly sched­uled class meet­ings, this course’s dis­cus­sion con­tin­ues in a vari­ety of online and vir­tual envi­ron­ments. Those who com­plete this course will know how to use social media pro­duc­tively, and have a frame­work for under­stand­ing and eval­u­at­ing new tools and platforms.

ASSIGNMENTS/COURSEWORK:

We will be using a shared wiki, indi­vid­ual blogs, a book­mark­ing ser­vice, and indi­vid­ual twit­ter accounts as the web plat­forms for this course.

The wiki func­tions as the cen­tral space for col­lab­o­ra­tion, where assign­ments and read­ings will be posted and dis­cus­sions will be held. The wiki will also have the required read­ing list, which may change dur­ing the course accord­ing to our progress.

The online require­ments serve both to famil­iar­ize you with new web com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nolo­gies and to con­tinue the dis­cus­sion beyond the con­fines of the campus.

• Wiki – 5% of final grade. The first require­ment is to use the wiki as directed in the class assign­ments or to add to the dis­cus­sion or com­mon pages.

• Blog — 25% of final grade. The sec­ond is to pub­lish a min­i­mum of two blog posts each week on top­ics rel­e­vant to the class dis­cus­sion, as described in the syl­labus and con­text of the read­ings. Each blog post should link to rel­e­vant resources on the web. The blog will be eval­u­ated on the qual­ity of engage­ment with themes of the class, the clar­ity of expres­sion, and the cul­ti­va­tion of com­mu­nity through reg­u­lar posts and com­ments. Each blog post must include the tag “S10CNJ595”.

• Microblog – 10% of final grade. The third will involve main­tain­ing a Twit­ter account active with at min­i­mum one post­ing every 24hrs. Twit­ter is a free micro-blogging ser­vice and com­mu­nity where a post is 140 char­ac­ters or less. Twit­ter posts will be eval­u­ated on the cul­ti­va­tion of com­mu­nity through friend­ing, retweets (and being retweeted), and gen­eral engage­ment through @replies.

• Social Book­mark­ing – 5% of final grade. The fourth is to book­mark web­sites that are of inter­est to the course, using the free ser­vice deli­cious ( http://del.icio.us/ or http://delicious.com ). Stu­dents will be expected to com­plete 40 book­marks rel­e­vant to class top­ics through­out the semes­ter, at least 20 of which should be done by mid-term. Each book­mark must also include the tag “S10CNJ595”.

• Top­i­cal Pre­sen­ta­tion and Dis­cus­sion – 25% of final grade. You will be expected to deliver a pre­sen­ta­tion dur­ing the course.You may choose to research and present an exist­ing rela­tional tech­nol­ogy (a social net­work or a social media tool), cov­er­ing the fol­low­ing aspects: what is the his­tory of the tech­nol­ogy or plat­form? What are the rela­tional aspects and func­tion­al­i­ties? How is iden­tity devel­oped? What types of activ­i­ties cre­ated dig­i­tal traces? How are rela­tion­ships cre­ated and dis­played? How are com­mu­ni­ties formed and man­aged? How does the social dis­cov­ery of infor­ma­tion, news, and events occur? How does the plat­form or tech­nol­ogy inte­grate with exter­nal web services?

  Alter­na­tively, you may choose to inter­view a rec­og­nized thought-leader or entre­pre­neur in social media, includ­ing: how did they get started with social media? What is their field of exper­tise or strength in social media? What were the mile­stones in their own online devel­op­ment? What do they con­sider to be his­tor­i­cal mile­stones in social media (case stud­ies, new tech­nolo­gies, etc.)? What chal­lenges have they faced and what bat­tles have they fought along the way (anec­dotes are impor­tant)? What is the future of social media?Presentations should be 20 min­utes in length with accom­pa­ny­ing visuals.

Par­tic­i­pa­tion — 20% of final grade. Class par­tic­i­pa­tion is required. Stu­dents are expected to do all the required read­ings for the course, to attend classes reg­u­larly, to have com­pleted the read­ing in advance of classes, and to par­tic­i­pate actively in class dis­cus­sion. Stu­dents will facil­i­tate dis­cus­sion, together with one other stu­dent, on selected syl­labus read­ings. Each read­ing will be pre­sented by this team of two stu­dents, who will coor­di­nate among them­selves and come to class pre­pared to sum­ma­rize the mate­r­ial, develop addi­tional themes for fur­ther dis­cus­sion and facil­i­tate broad dis­cus­sion, work­ing from ques­tions sub­mit­ted by stu­dents. Stu­dents will be graded on the clar­ity of pre­sen­ta­tion and the level of under­stand­ing of the read­ings under discussion.

Final Exam — 10% of final grade. The final exam will eval­u­ate your famil­iar­ity with social media con­cepts, case stud­ies, and vocabulary.

COURSE TOPICS OUTLINE

Ses­sion 1 Jan­u­ary 20, 2010 — Meet the social web

Class intro­duc­tions: who are we and what are our inter­ests; what do we expect and want out of this class?

Instruc­tor and stu­dents intro­duce them­selves, instruc­tor explains objec­tives, assign­ments and expectations.

Course intro­duc­tion: what has changed online, how and why we got here:

* Overview of social media and Web 2.0

*  Dif­fer­ences between tra­di­tional media and social media

*  Intro­duc­tion to wikis, includ­ing PBwiki and MediaWiki

Ses­sion 2 Jan­u­ary 27, 2010 — Blog­ging con­cepts, ethics, terms, tools, and techniques

*  Blog­ging cul­ture: authen­tic­ity, trans­parency, author­ity, influ­ence, ethics, and credibility

*  Writ­ing for the web: how do peo­ple read and browse online?

*  News­pa­pers text vs. online text: sim­i­lar­i­ties and contrasts

*  Cor­po­rate blogging

*  Host­ing your own blog vs. using hosted blog platforms

*  Cre­ation of a web site using Word­Press con­tent man­age­ment system

*  Basics of HTML and CSS to get you out of a jam

*  Track­backs, links, tags, side­bars, blogrolls, wid­gets, and feeds

*  Prin­ci­pal search engines for blogs

Ses­sion 3 Feb­ru­ary 3, 2010 — RSS feeds and fee­dread­ers: tech­niques in dis­tri­b­u­tion, pro­duc­tiv­ity, and monitoring.

All you wanted to know about RSS but were afraid to ask:

*  Feed read­ers: man­age your infor­ma­tion over­load and save time.

*  Google Reader and Feedly

*  Google Shared Items

*  Pub­lish­ing and dis­trib­ut­ing your media online; syn­di­cat­ing your media and con­tent to your com­mu­ni­ties through RSS

*  Mon­i­tor­ing your rep­u­ta­tion, your brands and your keywords

*  Set­ting up feeds and alerts for the infor­ma­tion that mat­ters to you

*  Feed­burner

*  Face­book feeds, Tum­blr, Jaiku, Friend­Feed and SocialThing

*  Blog and social net­work widgets

Ses­sion 4 Feb­ru­ary 10, 2010 — Social net­works, iden­tity, and your brand

*  Your life online: con­sid­er­a­tions when set­ting up an account

*  Your online CV: busi­ness net­work­ing with LinkedIn

*  Social Graph: 6 degrees of sep­a­ra­tion, in the­ory and practice

*  Online com­mu­ni­ties and social net­works: becom­ing an active mem­ber and participating

*  Rapid cog­ni­tion online

*  Social net­work­ing for pro­mot­ing peo­ple, prod­ucts, and services

*  How does social net­work design and archi­tec­ture affect par­tic­i­pa­tion? What else affects participation?

Invited guest: Face­book app expert

* Com­par­ing the plat­forms: LinkedIn, MySpace, Face­book, Hi5, Orkut, and more

*  Face­book apps and Open Social

*  Whose data is it? Closed gar­dens and net­work data portability

Ses­sion 5 Feb­ru­ary 17, 2010 — Addi­tional con­cepts, plat­forms, and techniques

*  It’s all social. How peo­ple con­nect: frame­work for under­stand­ing and analysis

*  Social object: friend-based social­ity and object-centered sociality

*  The social media starfish

*  OpenID

*  Pho­tog­ra­phy on the web: what’s Flickr and how does it fit in?

*  Copy­right and Cre­ative Commons

*  Har­ness­ing col­lec­tive intel­li­gence: social book­marks, folk­sonomies, col­lab­o­ra­tive and active filtering

*  Google and Google News search hacks

Invited speaker: web ana­lyt­ics and SEO expert

*  How online robots and spi­ders index and crawl through your content

*  Met­rics, mea­sure­ment and analytics

*  Search engine opti­miza­tion (SEO), search mar­ket­ing, and social media opti­miza­tion (SMO)

Ses­sion 6 Feb­ru­ary 24, 2010 — Video and audio dis­tri­b­u­tion and sharing

* Medi­as­nacks. Film­ing, edit­ing, and pub­lish­ing a short video online

*  Record­ing an audio inter­view, edit­ing, and upload­ing it

*  Use of images, graphs, and maps to illus­trate texts

*  Cre­at­ing Sound­slides with pho­tos and audio

*  Using Bit­tor­rent for upload­ing and down­load­ing large files

*  Con­ver­sa­tional video: Seesmic is to YouTube what Twit­ter is to Blogger

Ses­sion 7 March 3, 2010 — Your iden­tity online and offline.

Behav­ior affects cred­i­bil­ity, author­ity, and influence.

What about pri­vacy, secu­rity, and ethics?

Spe­cial guests: local blog­gers are invited to class for a round­table dis­cus­sion on their expe­ri­ences, over pizza and soft drinks

Ses­sion 8 March 10, 2010 — Vir­tual worlds, Sec­ond Life, and World of Warcraft

Vir­tual worlds exist in many forms, and many more are sure to be cre­ated. We first look at World of War­craft, and then explore Sec­ondLife, the immer­sive vir­tual world. We’ll look at ways to bridge the vir­tual and phys­i­cal world in SecondLife.

Ses­sion 9 March 17, 2010 — SPRING RECESS / INTERCESSION

Required Read­ings: please con­sult the course wiki

Ses­sion 10 March 24, 2010 — Get­ting things done online, col­lec­tive action, and shar­ing economies

What can be done alone? What can be done col­lec­tively? How do indi­vid­u­als build up social cap­i­tal?  How can self-interest be lever­aged to cre­ate pub­lic goods? How do peo­ple orga­nize online into groups for coop­er­a­tion, col­lab­o­ra­tion, and col­lec­tive action? What are the rela­tion­ships between col­lec­tive action, com­mu­nity, and democ­racy? What mech­a­nisms facil­i­tate col­lec­tive action and com­mu­nity? Do social net­works allow for new forms of pro­duc­tion (ie., “non-market peer production”)?

Ses­sion 11 March 31, 2010 — Cloud com­put­ing, SaaS, open source, browsers, and standards

Overview of open source cul­ture and soft­ware. What fac­tors lead to suc­cess? What moti­vates contributors?

Does most of your data reside on your hard drive, or in the cloud? Which data is where? Why? Which fac­tors lead to greater migra­tion of data online?

Does the desk­top mat­ter any­more? How does the browser con­tinue to change, and why? What about new desk­top (and mobile) clients? Also, we take a look at browser extensions.

Overview of soft­ware as a ser­vice providers and plat­forms, for pri­vate, per­sonal busi­ness, and cor­po­rate use. What are the busi­ness models?

Ses­sion 12 April 7, 2010 — The chang­ing role of PR and marketing

How has online par­tic­i­pa­tion in social media affected brand, posi­tion­ing, adver­tis­ing, and pub­lic rela­tions? What role for community?

We explore case stud­ies of suc­cesses and fail­ure in social media com­mu­ni­ca­tions by brands. Are com­pa­nies hav­ing a hard time adjust­ing, and if so, why?

Guest speaker: PR 2.0 guru / expert

Ses­sion 13 April 14, 2010 — Cit­i­zen journalism

What are the mod­els for jour­nal­ism online? How do they lever­age the com­mu­nity? What are the ele­ments of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism sites? How is the infor­ma­tion struc­tured? In which ways do read­ers and the com­mu­nity par­tic­i­pate? How to main­tain rel­e­vance and qual­ity? If you could build a cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism site, what would it look like?

Ses­sion 14 April 21, 2010 — Cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism, part II

What are the mod­els for jour­nal­ism online? How do they lever­age the com­mu­nity? What are the ele­ments of cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism sites? How is the infor­ma­tion struc­tured? In which ways do read­ers and the com­mu­nity par­tic­i­pate? How to main­tain rel­e­vance and qual­ity? If you could build a cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism site, what would it look like?

Pos­si­ble guest speaker: direc­tor of a cit­i­zen jour­nal­ism website

Ses­sion 15 April 28, 2010 — Social media and real life

How do our online social activ­i­ties affect our lives per­son­ally and pro­fes­sion­ally? What con­trol do we main­tain, and what have we given up? What fur­ther changes might we expect?

How might this course work better?

Ses­sion 16 May 5, 2010 — FINAL EXAM