What makes social media -- such as Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and MySpace -- work? The goal of this project-based course is to merge social science, information science, computer science and engineering approaches to explore the social and technological forces driving social media services (including, for example, technological adoption, interaction design, social networks, computational and information aspects of social media, communication and motivation theories). Students will form interdisciplinary teams to conceptualize and implement a social media application. The interdisciplinary teams will build on the respective strength of students of different backgrounds to theorize, write, design, reason, build and manage social media applications.
There is no required textbook. Other readings TBD.
Optional for CS/ECE students:
- Goldman, J. (2008). Facebook Cookbook: Building Applications to Grow Your Facebook Empire, 1st ed. O'Reilly Media, Inc.
- Maver, J., Popp C. (2009). Essential Facebook Development: Build Successful Applications for
the Facebook Platform, 1st ed. Addison-Wesley Professional.
- ... or any other decent Web or Facebook programming guide.
Full schedule TBD.
Much of this class will be geared towards the development of a group project. The composition of groups will be decided by the second week of the class, and groups will have the remainder of the semester to complete the final projects. The projects will involve designing a social media application, with special attention to why it the application has potential to be adopted by a particular community, why it will be continually used, and (optionally) how the application may be used to collect data that will generate a better understanding of social media. The project will consist of both a written component -- written in an academic style with appropriate references -- as well as a mock-up application or working application, and a poster describing the application and highlighting key points from the written component. The complete projects are due on the last day of class and groups will present their projects to the class at that time. Projects will be discussed in greater deal during class.
30% Group Full Project Proposals (Group grade)
40% Group Projects (20% Individual Grade for Each Student's
Portion; 20% Group grade for quality of final project, presentations)
10% Peer Grade from Group Members
10% Article Discussion Lead
10% Class Participation and reading assignment discussion