CS 4472

Design of Online Communities is a 3-credit hour course that seeks to explore the nature of online interactions, understand the structure of communities online, and provide a survey of research topics within the field.

This course is cross-listed under CS 4472 and CS 6470 for the undergraduate and graduate sections respectively.

For undergraduate CS/CM students, this course satisfies a People thread elective.

For graduate MSCS students, this course satisfies an elective for the Human Centered Computing, Human Computer Interaction, and Social Computing specializations.

For graduate MSHCI students, this course satisfies an elective for the Interactive Computing specialization.

Workload

This is not a programming course - rather, assignments are all written.

From the 2022 CIOS results, students in the undergraduate section of the course (CS 4472) estimated a commitment of about 7.8 hours per week. Students in the graduate section (CS 6470) estimated a weekly commitment of 8.4 hours.

Assignments

A central component of the course is the community study paper (20-30 pages), where teams of three participate in an online community of their choice and use mixed methods approaches to analyze their site.

Students are also expected to actively participate in their chosen site by interacting with the community, taking field notes, and reaching out to interview participants. This should occur regularly throughout the course of the project.

The completion of three interview transcripts with community members constitute a portion of the final grade.

Other papers include a short paper on one's best and worst experiences in an online community (2-6 pages) and a short paper on an online community design idea (4-9 pages).

There are weekly readings on the topics covered in class, with reflections (1-2 pages) due the day prior to the class. Weekly readings may contain online sites to visit, such as DeviantArt, Stack Overflow, or the Georgia Tech subreddit.

There is no difference in the amount of work assigned between undergraduate students and graduate students in the class. However, students working in an all-undergraduate project team may be graded more leniently.

Late Policy

Reading reflections are due the day before class, but may be submitted prior to the start of class for a -3% penalty. After the start of class, unsubmitted assignments receive a zero.

For all other assignments, there are a total of 3 late days that may be allocated to submit an assignment late without a grade penalty. Used late days cannot be retroactively transferred to other assignments.

Attendance and Participation

In-person attendance and participation are expected, and constitute 10% of the course grade (as of Spring 2022). An attendance sheet is passed around during each class to verify attendance. An online stream of the course is offered, but should only be accessed if the student is feeling unwell and has already communicated with the head TA.

Extra Credit

Students may volunteer to present their community study paper and/or their online community design paper for between 1-3% extra credit on those assignments. Students have 7 minutes to present their papers, strictly timed. Presentations earn students +1% by default, with the possibility of earning up to 3% depending on the quality of the presentation.

Writing

Papers for the course are expected to follow APA format.

Students with English as a Second Language may mark their assignments with "ESL" to waive themselves from being penalized for their writing ability.

Topic List

This topic list is consistent as of Spring 2022:

• Defining communities
• Third places
• Research methods
• Research ethics
• Design factors
• Theory of identity
• Online identity
• Gender online
• Anonymity
• Sociotechnical systems and the politics of artifacts
• Managing bad online behavior
• Business models
• Qualitative data analysis
• Citizen science
• Collaboration and crowdsourcing
• Wikipedia and the nature of "truth"
• Knowledge-building
• Online privacy

Readings for the class consist of the following:

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman
• The Great Good Place, by Ray Oldenburg
• Interviewing as Qualitative Research, by I.E. Seidman
• Should You Believe Wikipedia?, by Amy Bruckman (provided to students for free)

Prerequisite Knowledge

No formal prerequisites exist for the class. Dr. Bruckman allows anyone - including freshmen - to take the course.

Familiarity with the subject matter of online communities is recommended to get the most out of this class.

Students will need to commit a significant amount of time reading and writing to do well in the course. Furthermore, online interactions with strangers will be common during the course of the community study - finding people willing to be interviewed can be difficult.