Course Topics

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Contents 1 January 20, 2010 - Meet the social web 2 January 27, 2010 - Blogging concepts, ethics, terms, tools, and techniques 3 February 3, 2010 - RSS feeds and feedreaders: distribution, productivity, and monitoring 4 February 10, 2010 - Social networks: reputation, identity, and authority 5 February 17, 2010 - Social media frameworks and platforms 6 February 24, 2010 - Video and audio distribution and sharing 7 March 3, 2010 - Your identity online and offline 8 March 10, 2010 - Virtual worlds, Second Life, and World of Warcraft 9 March 17, 2010 - SPRING RECESS / INTERCESSION 10 March 24, 2010 - Getting things done online, collective action, and sharing economies 11 March 31, 2010 - Cloud computing, SaaS, open source, browsers, and standards 12 April 7, 2010 - The changing role of PR and marketing 13 April 14, 2010 - Citizen journalism 14 April 21, 2010 - Citizen journalism, part II 15 April 28, 2010 - Social media and real life 16 May 5, 2010 - FINAL EXAM 17 Course Syllabus: Social Media Communication, Community, and Literacy

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
• Students discuss in groups and report back to instructor who will illustrate how to edit a wiki and take notes. In future classes, assigned students will take notes on the wiki.

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

February 3, 2010 - RSS feeds and feedreaders: 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
• Yahoo! Pipes feed mixing
• Facebook feeds, Tumblr, Jaiku, FriendFeed and SocialThing
• Blog and social network widgets

February 10, 2010 - Social networks: reputation, identity, and authority

• 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

February 17, 2010 - Social media frameworks and platforms

• 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
• The Conversation Prism
• 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)

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

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.

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. We’ll look at ways to bridge the virtual and physical world in SecondLife.

March 17, 2010 - SPRING RECESS / INTERCESSION

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”)?

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?

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

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?

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: CEO of citizen journalism site

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?

May 5, 2010 - FINAL EXAM

Course Syllabus: Social Media Communication, Community, and Literacy

• Course description and purpose
• Course Topics
• Assignments and coursework
• Admin#Course prerequisites
• Admin#Materials fees
• Admin#Texts
• Admin#Grading and evaluation
• Admin#Attendance policy