Topic 10 – Complexity and social networks

Exercise 10.1: Social networks case study

1. I’m going to assume that if someone has left comments on a blog then they are ‘following’ the author.  Blogger appears to have an explicit ‘follow’ function but I can’t find a parallel on WordPress so for group members not using Blogger I will just define ‘following’ as whether a comment has been left or not.

By this definition, in the blue pod:

Andrew is being followed by James, Sarah and Tyrone.

James is being followed by Sarah, Andrew and Jessica

Sarah is being followed by Petar, Jessica and Andrew

Tyrone is being followed by Sarah and James.

2. I have assigned the participants the following letters:

• A – Andrew
• B – James
• C – Sarah
• D – Tyrone

3. In the following matrix, each row represent a participant and each column a follower:

	A	B	C	D
A	0	1	1	1
B	1	0	1	0
C	1	0	0	0
D	0	1	1	0

The social network diagram is below (created with Balsamiq – another great web 2.0 tool!):

Social network diagram for the blue group

4. The fact that the diagram I was following (from the OLR notes) didn’t seem to articulate an direction of flow made analysing the relationships far more difficult – but here goes:

The http://www.calresco.org/intro.htm reference in the notes talks about the self-organising behaviour of complex systems and how environmental feedback is a key driver to this.  One pattern that I noticed is that it seems rare from someone to be following someone else and not have that replicated.  Blogs – unlike Facebook or LinkedIn – have two strands to relationships, A can follow B and B can follow A.  The interest that one participant shows in another (feedback from the environment) often seems to result in an additional new relationship being formed.  It was interesting to note that “Such responsiveness occurs even when the elements and system are non-organic, unintelligent and unconcious…” – no comment!

Another interesting observation is the loose framework that the subject is run within, yet many of the blogs turn out to be quite similar in length, tone and tool.  This seems to be a by-product of running the subject in such an open forum where everyone’s work is open to the group – a group style emerges.  Pavard (2006) mentions that socio cognitive systems are sometimes emergent and mentions the resulting crowd behaviour.

5.1/5.2 I don’t believe that I would find the same patterns if I was to perform this analysis on another set of blogs due to the Order/Chaos dynamic of complex systems described by Kirshbaum (2002).   He describes the uncertainty of predictability due to the tiniest changes of environment creating a huge number of possible results.  There is much environmental uncertainty in a university class – particularly one that incorporates distance learning.  Although most students seem to be school teachers from rural areas in Australia, I for example am an interaction designer based in London.  It is impossible to predict what effect that could have on the dynamic of a group.  Kirshbaum uses the ubiquitous illustration for this principle of a butterfly flapping its wings in one part of the world can cause a hurricane in another.  In an environment as varied and complex as an online classroom, many of the contextual factors are not even perceivable let alone predictable.

Kirshbaum, D. (2002).  Introduction to Complex Systems. Retrieved October 26, 2009, from http://www.calresco.org/intro.htm.

Pavard, B & Dugdale, J (2006).  An Introduction to Complexity in Social Science.  Retrieved October 26, 2009, from http://www.irit.fr/COSI/training/complexity-tutorial/why-socio-cognitive-systems-are-complex.htm.

Topic 9 – Business, government and research perceptions

Exercise 9.1: Is social networking a business model?

I joined LinkedIn in 2007 but haven’t touched it since. Updating my profile is one of those things that I intend to do one day but never seem to have time to do (as opposed to Facebook where I seem to end up even if I try not to!).

Social networking/media provide new ways for companies to converse with their customers.  Although this may increase visibility, enhance the brand and provide new ways of getting feedback, I wouldn’t consider it a ‘business model’ in its own right.  There may be some exceptions to this for companies who actually make their money directly from social networking/media (such as companies who develop applications for Facebook), but generally I would see social networking/media as enhancing what the businesses are already doing.

Exercise 9.2: Research and evaluation in Government 2.0

1.1. Wiki drafts of papers for discussion would theoretically allow a large group of people to collaborate to produce a paper that would have been done through an alternative process of public consultation which by its nature would involve far fewer people.  I am a skeptical about the use of wiki for government.  Wikipedia works because of the strict academic code in regards to referencing and sourcing information.  In a context where opinion may be entirely subjective, this becomes far more difficult.  Also, a wiki allows the opinions of those on the margins to be erased entirely – this may be appropriate for a public encyclopedia but is completely unacceptable for government purposes.

1.2 Twitter in government is less controversial however.  This has the potential to be of great democratic benefit as it not only provides a mechanism through which information can be ‘broadcast’ to the public but also allows subsequent discussion and comment to be generated that was not previously possible.  Members of government from all levels could tweet relevant information from matters of federal policy (e.g. economic stimulus measures) to the most minute of local issues (fixing a pot hole).  If the appropriate resources were put in place to monitor and report on twitter activity, much could be learned by government about the mood and opinion of citizens.

2. I do see myself as a supporter of government 2.0.  I see the biggest problem with democracy as being ignorance and lack of participation.  I would hope that by providing people with more visibility of the issues and workings of government as well as the opportunity to provide their opinions, they will not only be ‘heard’ but will also have a greater understanding of the issues in the first place (and views that oppose their own).

It was interesting having a look at the Gov 2.0 Task Force site as I had heard about it from friend and fellow interaction designer Ben Crothers (who not only designed much of it but also won the logo competition – see the acknowledgment right below the logo!).  I like the way the task force is engaging industry leaders, it provides weight and legitimacy to the process and helps ensure that what is output is informed and realistic.  I suppose it couldn’t be a ‘Web 2.0’ site without a tag cloud could it?

I didn’t realise that the Gov 2.0 conference was only a week ago.  It looks as though there was a fair amount of interest and coverage (although I’m surprised that only “Hundreds of people from Australia and around the world viewed the conference proceedings online through live streams”).

Topic 8 – Applications, tools and services

Exercise 8.1: The 30 minute walk

As I pass through the front door the fresh autumn air reminds me that winter is fast approaching.  I turn the corner and can see the activity on Brick Lane, running perpendicular.  The contrast between that street and my own only a single block surprises me every time I move between the two.  As I approach Brick Lane I can smell the sweet scent of many curry houses cooking the first orders of the evening and hear the raucous banter of drinkers, walking up the street in cheerful groups.  As I turn the corner I see the street sign in English and Bengali and am reminded of the cultural melting pot that 21st century London is.

There is something comfortable about the narrow cobbled streets and old buildings around the Truman Brewery but I have to stay on my toes as I move in and out of the crowds as cars crawl up the narrow one-way street towards Bethnal Green road at the top of Brick Lane.  The outrageous fashions and hairstyles, quirky coffee shops and vintage clothing stores stand in contrast to the curry houses and woman in hijabs but it makes for a strange balance which grows on you very quickly.

As I exit Brick Lane and head the block back to my street I muse to myself that I will always think back fondly to these times.

I have created a Google map of my stroll at http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=
113719407279333524030.000475c397861f50ebf86.   Use the streetview feature to take the walk yourself (drag the little man onto the map)!

Exercise 8.2: The avalanche of applications self-interview

1. Have I discovered any new tools that I will use after the course is over?

Although I have found many of the tools interesting, I don’t seem to have the time to stay on top of Facebook and Twitter let alone fly around virtual worlds in Second Life.  I suspect that unless there is some strong underlying personal or professional need that drives my participation I wont persist with anything beyond Facebook and Twitter.

2. How do I currently use social networking tools?

As an Australian who lives in London I find that I use Facebook to stay up-to-date with my friends at home.  I use Twitter professionally as a way to stay abreast of what people in my field are saying.  Sometimes these are thoughts and musings, often they are links through to interesting blogs and articles.  I am a member of Linked In but other than opening the odd update email that comes through, I don’t actively log in and probably haven’t updated my profile since 2007.

3. How can I apply what I have learned to my professional life?

As an interaction designer I find that having to design for social networking and social media is becoming more and more common as the web shifts to a more web 2.0 model.  I found the content on sociability really interesting as although I am used to designing for usability, person to person interaction has its own dynamics – particularly when creating an environment that encourages users to join and contribute.

Exercise 8.3: Data portability, FOAF and the Semantic web

1. Watched the ‘Get your data out’ video.  I don’t think that song will be going number 1 anytime soon.  For anyone curious about his pronunciation of day-ta – this is the English way of saying the word and I have been mocked many-a-time since moving to London for my Australian pronunciation of dar-ta.

2. I’m not sure that the movement of our data between sites is like a chain letter.  In my observation, people don’t typically pass on information about others on these kinds of sites (except perhaps for the odd twitter comment about someone), its more about themselves.

3. The FOAF project aims to “create a web of machine readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do” (“About FOAF”, n.d.).  This ties in well with the aims of the W3C’s Semantic Web to allow data to be shared and reused across application, enterprise and community boundaries (W3C, n.d.).  Providing the ‘meaning’ of social information and relationships via a machine readable format opens up all kinds of possibilities for web services that can do much of the work in performing tasks that can only be done manually by us today.  For example I could suggest a night out with my friends which could be negotiated and organised by our agents software that is acting on behalf of us.  Providing that the relevant information was encoded, my agent could decide who I would want to invite, and move the time around based on my availability and the importance of my other appointments based on who was available and how important it was that they came.

Exercise 8.4: Aggregation, syndication and the social engine

a) RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication and is an XML-based format for publishing web content (Winer, n.d.).  Syndication describes the practice of producing content which is published through multiple outlets (“Syndicate”, n.d.), aggregation is simply the “act of collecting together” (“Aggregation”, n.d.).  In the context of the web, these concepts describe how content is published out using RSS to be viewed in many different contexts, often in readers that create an aggregation of syndicated content from many sources, representing to a user newly-published content that is interesting to them.

These concepts have changed the way that people follow and consume information from the early web which was more aligned with traditional media and publishing channels to a far more dynamic and personalised view, allowing users to negotiate vast amounts of content to find information that is interesting to them.

I use the web-based Google Reader tool which allows me to subscribe to RSS feeds simply by searching for them and clicking the ‘Subscribe’ button shown in the results listing.  I also interact with Podcasts via iTunes, again performing searches and then clicking the relevant ‘Subscribe’ button.

The swarm concept at digg provides a dynamic and real-time view of popular content according to the number of people who are reading (swarming around) it.  The stack is another dynamic view that shows article read counts being incremented as they are being ‘digged’.  I can’t help but think of this as a virtual parallel to people wandering over to a crowd of people to see what the fuss is about which in turn draws more people in to see what the fuss is about!

b) Delicious is a similar concept to Digg in that it acts as a crowd-driven moderator by bubbling popular items up to the surface.  It is less transient in nature however as it also allows users to tag and describe their bookmarks – creating an extremely valuable folksonomy with a rich set of crowd-sourced information from many people.  This has wonderful potential for workgroups as the informal knowledge references that each individual brings to the group can be consolidated in a way that can be leveraged by everyone in the workgroup.  This creates a valuable resource that represents much of the knowledge of the group that is visible and easily accessed by all.  The concept of a tag is fundamental to the creation of a folksonomy and refers a meta-data label that someone gives to something that describes what it is.  In some ways this is not unlike the concept of a markup tags that web publishers will be familiar with as it is essentially meta-data that describes the meaning of something – one however is a pre-defined construct of a markup language and the other is a fluid categorisation concept.

c) GoToWeb20.net provides a similar service to what has been discussed above for Digg and Delicious, its focus is however on Web 2.0 applications rather than ‘content’.  This is quite novel and extremely useful.  I am already a big advocate of light-weight, web-based tools as opposed to bloated ‘Enterprise’ software and given the vast volume of applications and categories that I can see here, I would be surprised if a couldn’t find some kind of application to suit most contexts and needs for a group of people who are working together – whether in the same room or across the world.

d) The Elgg social engine is a web application that runs on an Apache/PHP/MySQL platform and provides the configurable building blocks from which new social networking sites can be created via the administration interface (or application programming interface for the brave!).  This would definitely be a valuable application to have in the workplace.  As it is highly customisable it can be tailored to the specific needs of the organisation and has the potential to be a repository for profile and contact information, blogs, groups and files, activity feeds (these could help managers keep track of what their teams are working on) and social bookmarking to mention a few.

About FOAF. (n.d.). Retrieved October 20, 2009, from http://www.foaf-project.org/about.

Aggregation. (n.d.). Retrieved October 21, 2009, from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/aggregation.

Syndicate. (n.d.). Retrieved October 21, 2009, from http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/syndicate.

W3C. (n.d.). W3C Semantic Web Activity. Retrieved October 20, 2009, from http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/.

Winer, D. (n.d.). RSS 2.0 specification. Retrieved October 21, 2009, from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html.

Topic 7 – Devices for display and interaction

Exercise 7.1: Smart screen interface study

Dan Saffer provides an introduction to the mechanics of touchscreen devices in his text Designing gestural interfaces (2009, pp. 12-16).  He starts with a general architecture for gestural systems according to systems theory of sensor, comparator and an actuator.  The sensor is the part mentioned in the HowStuffWorks article given in the OLR question, which for the iPod touch is a capacitive sensor panel.  When the user touches the screen, a portion of the charge stored in the coating material is transferred to the user, decreasing the panel’s capacitive layer and triggering a touch event (Saffer, p. 15).  Saffer also mentions other methods for implementing touchscreen sensors such as resistives with two layers pushed together and surface wave using the interruption of ultrasonic waves.

The activity detected by the sensor is then passed on to the comparator, which in the iPod touch is the gesture software mentioned in the HowStuffWorks article.  The comparator compares the current state of the system to the previous state and makes a decision as to what needs to be done as the result of the input.

Finally, this decision is fed through to the actuator which performs the appropriate action.

One of the things that struck me most about the iPhone the first time I used it was the smoothness of the interaction when browsing websites.  I worked with iPaq PDAs in 2002/2003 and although these represented the state-of-the-art in mobile browsing at the time, it was still an excruciating experience.  The multi-touch ‘pinch to shrink’ and ‘stretch to zoom’ gestures allow the user to get their bearings on a page and then easily zoom in deeper to relevant content without becoming disoriented.  This is a simple but powerful use of natural gestures which made the iPod touch/iPhone so superiour to the competition of the time.

Exercise 7.2: New devices, aged care and people with disabilities

This question is very topical for me at the moment.  I am currently redesigning Barclays online banking system and we will be spending an entire sprint (4 week chunk of effort in the Scrum methodology) updating and testing the system for accessibility.  This includes designing for and running testing sessions with users who have visual impairments, motor impairments and cognitive difficulties (such as severe dyslexia).  The participants we will be testing with use a range of assistive technologies including:

• Screen readers
• Text-to-speech systems
• Keyboard-only navigation
• Voice-recognition software

I’ve had some experience with most of these technologies, but voice-recognition is not something I’ve explicitly designed for before.  WebAIM is a source that I often refer to for accessibility resources and their Motor Disabilities: Assistive technologies article (n.d.) has an excellent introduction to these devices.  It defines voice recognition software as “software that allows a person to control the computer by speaking”.  The article also makes the point that although the disabilities and assistive technologies used to support those disabilities are extremely varied (in their thousands), almost all assistive technologies for motor disabilities work through or emulate the keyboard.  This means that by designing interactions that support keyboard accessibility, you are creating a system that will be accessible to users with motor disabilities.  It finishes with a mention that navigation in as many key strokes as possible is an important part of this.  The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines define what is considered keyboard accessible (“W3C”, 2008).

Saffer, D.  (2009).  Designing gestural interfaces. Sebastopol: O’Reilly.

Motor Disabilities: Assistive technologies.  (n.d.).  Retrieved October 1, 2009, from http://www.webaim.org/articles/motor/assistive.php.

W3C. (2008). Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. Retrieved October 1, 2009, from http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG/.

Topic 6 – Designing for usability, sociability and sustainability

Exercise 6.1: Design rules and your CSU forum experience

My first subject at CSU was ‘INF440 Introduction to Information Architecture’.  As someone who was in the middle of a career change to a specialisation that was new and uncommon, the forum for this subject invoked a sense of belonging, worth and satisfaction as well as a sense of loss when it closed.

• Purpose: As the introductory subject for a new masters course, it was unique for the participants as almost everyone was starting a Masters of Information Architecture.  This was in contrast to the other more general subjects that would make up the course over the next 3 years as they contained students from varying courses and degree types.  Because of the unique purpose of this subject, everyone’s introduction was interesting.  Each unique background and reason for taking the course fed into the group’s understanding of what Information Architecture was and what could be done with it.
• People: The course was primarily made up of students with some type of background in the library/information sciences.  As someone from an ITC background who had only ever worked with Information Architects in a web development environment, this was actually surprising to me.  In hindsight however, perhaps the fact that it was offered by the school of Information Studies should have given that away.
• Community size: With around 20 participants (not including any lurkers that may have been lurking!), the size was small enough that you could remember previous contributions and construct a mental image of most of the participants.  It was also large enough to ensure that a steady stream of conversation was maintained.

Exercise 6.2: Wiki and Moodle design

Visually, the interface had a very ‘old-school’ appearance and it took me a few minutes to work out how the site hung together.  From an interaction design perspective I don’t think that the interface did enough to surface recent activity – instead this lay buried under various categories – which would have provided more dynamism to the interface and in turn encouraged more participation.   On reflection however, the concept of housing a number of powerful paradigms for social interaction together in one interface (wiki, blog, forum, calendar) has a great deal of potential.    I had a poke around the forums, which were a little dusty with the last activity being from 2007!  I then added a blog entry and tagged it with the existing tag of ‘OLR exercises’.

Although a Moodle shares the common attribute with a wiki of being able to anonymously edit content, a Moodle also brings a sense of the individual that a wiki does not.  A Moodle seems to be a meta-tool which incorporates a number of paradigms for social interaction, including those of the wiki, whereas the wiki focuses only on the creation of content without a sense of contributor.  If I could sum it up succinctly – a wiki is about content, a Moodle is about people, content and conversations.

I think that the presence of “likeable” features is a combination of good usability, sociability and sustainability as advocated by Preece and Kim.  Ultimately, what is likeable is that which is useful to someone in achieving their goals, which are of course closely related to the broader goals of the community.  This was illustrated in the reading material for topic 6 by the robustness principle of ‘Task conformance’ which is the measure to which the system’s features completely and adequately support the user’s tasks.  If the features of a system are closely aligned to this goal-directed behaviour then those features will be deemed “likeable” by its users.

Exercise 6.3: Trust and reputation, how is it achieved?

I will consider this question in regard to Google and YouTube.  Don Norman addresses trust in his landmark book Emotional Design (2004, pp. 141-143).  He lists reliance, confidence and integrity as the qualities of trust.  Both Google and YouTube are platforms that service a massive amount of requests, so reliance and confidence are established over many successful interactions over an extended period of time.  For Google, trust is built each time someone types in a query and finds what they were looking for in the first few results.  This trust is what they then so cleverly use to sell pay-per-click traffic to advertisers.  YouTube similarly build trust through the qualities of reliance and confidence by firstly having relevant content for most searches and then allowing users to find that content.  Norman’s final quality of integrity is satisfied differently by these two platforms.  Google clearly demarcates their paid traffic with its ‘Sponsored Links’ label, this provides transparency to users which prevents trust from being eroded by the presence of these paid links.  YouTube resists the temptation to promote their ‘Featured Videos’ first on the homepage and instead gives the slot to ‘Videos being watched now’.  They also keep paid-for content clearly separate further down in the site.

Google has done such a good job in the quality of its search results and usability of its results pages that people actually talk about “Googling” something.  Once something gets enough momentum it almost becomes accepted wisdom.  YouTube is a more socially-based platform which relies on content submitted by members so is heavily dependent on the early adopters and technology enthusiasts to ensure that a base of content is gathered that can then appeal to the pragmatists, conservatives and skeptics.  This makes sociability an important attribute and as well as the usual social features of comments and user-generated content, features such as ‘Videos being watched now’ add a dynamic community element.

Usability, sociability and sustainability draw mainstream users by creating accessible and dynamic systems with low barriers to entry that clearly satisfy the goals and concerns that these mainstream users have.

Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design. New York: Basic Books.

Topic 5 – Online community building and social architects

Exercise 5.1: The many faces of you

My online identities:

• Google profile
• Facebook
• Designthinkage.com blog
• ITC510 blog
• Skype
• LinkedIn
• Flickr
• Couchsurfing.com
• Google groups (seems to be quite seperate from the standard Google profile information)

Whether I show a “persistent” or “multiple” identities is a difficult question to answer when phrased that way.  I consider myself as showing multiple facets of a persistent identity – which contains qualities of both persistence and multiplicity.  As I’ve mentioned in earlier OLR questions, my Facebook identity is more focused on fun whereas designthinkage.com (my professional blog) obviously needs to have a slightly more serious tone to it.  These are both genuine attributes of a single persistent identity but are moderated to match the context.  This is consistent with how I would behave in the ‘real’ world.

What your online identity communicates is based on the context of the community.  If in a social network where questions are being answered, things such as how long you have been a member and how many questions you have answered help other members to judge the quality of your responses.  ‘Softer’ things such as the name and photo you choose for yourself also communicates how approachable your are and how serious you take yourself.  Ethically, someone’s identity online should not be a function of their race, gender or other attribute unless relevant to the community in which they are engaging.  This is one of the great things about the anonymity of the web.

Even an attribute such as a picture of yourself can vary wildly between communities.  Take for example a photo that you might have for yourself on Facebook compared to the image that you wish to project to a network of your professional peers.  The photo of you wearing a Mankini and holding a beer might be good for a laugh among friends but might be a career-limiting move if used as part of your professional identity!

Exercise 5.2: Social architects and online games

1. Being a bit of a buzzword, “Social architecture” can be a little hard to define.   Most references to it seems to popup sometime in 2007 (around the time social networking starting to hot up) and be in close proximity to words such as information architecture, user experience, social media, sociology and even “ideation”.  I would define social architecture as “the design of virtual systems that facilitate and encourage specific social interactions”.

2. As I feel like I have already joined almost every social network available at some point over the last 5 topics I’ve decided to just go with the suggested communities for something new.  Whyville does a great job at initially engaging you.  You create a little avatar and before you know it you’re halfway through the registration process!  ShuffleBrain was interesting as it leverages your existing Facebook profile – which relates to the discussion earlier in this topic around the reuse of a persistent identity.  I tried a pattern matching game and found it really engaging.  It even used my Facebook photo to show me where I scored on the scale.

The key difference that I see between these two communities is that Whyville is a self-contained environment with a community of members that has been built up from scratch.  ShuffleBrain on the other hand utilises the existing facebook community to provide an instant access to participants by leveraging the identity that they have already spent much time creating.  This model of building identities and then sharing their information with applications on request has been wildly successful for Facebook and not only allows ‘sub-communities’ to spring up quickly but also increases the appeal and interest of Facebook in general.

3.

Community	Objectives	Rules of engagement	Unique features
Whyville	To provide children an environment where they can interact with other children and play games. There is an educational focus to the site and their is a focus on learning and safety.	Being a community specifically for children, these are more explicit than typical rules of engagement and focused on specifics rather than the general spirit of the community. Examples of this are the requirement that children under 13 years of age obtain consent from a parent before engaging in the community. In addition to this, the chat policy discourages the usual suspects of profanity, racism, bigotry etc as well as forbidden the disclosure by anyone of information that could identify a user.	The longevity of the community is one of the unique features of Whyville. In addition to this is the fact that this community exists for specific age groups – meaning that the population of the community would have turned over several times since its inception in 1999. The visual nature of the interaction is also quite unique. Although this has since been by done others such as Second Life, it must have been one of the first and most successful to adopt this mode of interaction.
Shuffle Brain	Shuffle Brain is community built around the playing of ‘brain games’. Although the game play itself is a solo activity, community is fostered through the element of competition and comments around specific games.  As the Shuffle Brain website puts it “…creating games that keep you sharp and socially connected”.	Doesn’t seem to have an explicit set of rules of engagement. Sitting within Facebook however I suppose that it must comply with their broader guidelines which is titled the ‘Statement of rights and responsibilities and can be found at http://www.facebook.com/careers/department.php?dept=design#/terms.php?ref=pf. This covers spam, viruses and malicious code, bullying, content with nudity or of a hateful nature and interestingly a clause specifically regarding the marketing of alcohol-rated content.	Shuffle Brain is unique in that it is made up of two groups – game creators and game players. The emphasis on the game creator’s both encourages an additional sense of connection as well as giving more credence to the use of the games as serious tools for brain development.

4. Founding out about who is behind Whyville was actually rather difficult.  The about us section of the website didn’t shed much light so I took a cue from the small print at the bottom right and Googled “Numedeon”.  Their website is a bizarre virtual reception room which as an information architect made me cringe and remember the mid 90’s when metaphors stretched to their limits in an attempt to use them for navigation.  Although I can find precious little about who is behind Whyville, according to my definition of a social architect above, the Whyville creators can certainly be considered social architects.

Shuffle Brain was founded by Amy Jo and Scott Kim (I assume they are married) and seems to have investment from some major venture capitalists.  Given that she is listed as being an “expert in online social architecture” and he is a puzzle designer, it appears that they manage the site on an ongoing basis.  In addition to Amy Jo’s impressive list of clientele and her bio actually explicitly mentioning the words “social architecture’, the site has been designed with a definite social agenda in mind, so I would say that they are indeed social architects.

Topic 4 – Human centred computing: human interfaces

Exercise 4.1: Blog or Wiki design

1. When designing/managing content in a blog, the most obvious starting point is the use of tools such as categories and tags that come ‘out-of-the-box’ in practically all blogging software.  As well as being easy to setup, they are a well established convention that are looked for and understood by readers.  The comments section of a blog is the feature most relevant to the establishment of community and interaction between people – so creating content that facilitates discussion and then cultivating and responding to that discussion as it occurs is an important.

2. WordPress is the blogging tool that I use both for my academic blog (https://andyitc510.wordpress.com/) and my professional blog (http://designthinkage.com).  WordPress (like all blogging tools) primarily supports asynchronous conversations between people in the form of the blogs and the resulting comments trail.  In many ways, each blog is in itself an online community – having the elements outlined by Kim (2000a; 2000b) of

• Design for growth and change: The categorisation and tagging tools are fluid and can easily changed.  WordPress even goes as far as allowing categories and tags to be added in a ‘just-in-time’ fashion as part of writing a post – which makes it easy to evolve the structure of a blog as time goes on.
• Create and maintain community feedback: Tools are included for managing comments made on a post by having them held until they are approved, deleted or marked as spam.  References to a post are then automatically maintained via the pingback concept.
• Allow members to gradually take more control: Customisation of blogs through themes could be considered an increase in control to members.  WordPress themes are a big business now with many free and paid-for themes available.

In terms of the 9 design strategies (Kim, 2000a):

1. Purpose: this is set by the author and can be expressed in the WordPress title and tagline attributes.
2. Make the establishment of community easy: WordPress is a single-click install (if installed at all) and published to the web so anyone with a browser can participate.
3. A set of profile attributes are available which include things such as email and IM contact information and bibliographic information.  These can then be exposed by themes as required.
4. The roles in a blog are pretty well defined and not open to much evolution.  There is the author(s) and then those that participate in the discussion.  There could however be an informal arrangement where certain users help moderate and facilitate discussion.
5. Leaders need to be fostered: As above.
6. Community rules and mores need to be developed: This will be primarily dictated by the topic of the blog and the style and tone of the author’s writing.
7. Regular events help promote relationships: I suppose that regular postings could assist in getting a more stable community to form around a blog or collection of blogs.
8. Rituals help develop a more mature online culture: I’m not sure that this point is particularly relevant to a blog-based community.
9. A large community can sustain sub-groups.  WordPress.com is an excellent example of a large community which sustains sub-groups.  These pivot around tags.

Exercise 4.2: Hosting good conversations

a) 3 ways of of providing users with more control in an online community.  This is a difficult one to discuss because the control that users are after is very much a function of the community itself.  In generic terms, I would say

1. Provide easy visibility of interesting activity: Facebook does this very well.  By highlighting activity that users are likely to want to see, they feel more engagement in the community and a greater sense of belonging.  How often have you scanned your facebook news feed and found yourself making a comment or looking through a photo album?
2. Make identity visible and easily updated: As we’ve learned in ITC510 so far, our online persona is an important part of our involvement with an online community.  If users can easily see and maintain this their sense of control will be much improved.
3. Allow control over the visibility of contributions where appropriate: This is especially important when there is a varied audience in a community and the reason for Facebook’s restricted profile feature.

b) 3 rules/tips that I have experienced or found interesting

1. A feeling of ownership.  Participants become evangelists: This point brings to mind things that I have read about building communities around a product or an idea, particularly from Kathy Sierra.  This is summarised well in her ‘You can out-spend or you can out-teach’ post (http://headrush.typepad.com/creating_passionate_users/2005/09/you_can_outspen.html).
2. Enable people to entertain themselves rather than being just the passive consumers of canned entertainment: This is related to what I wrote in my answer for Topic 3 around the use of engaging games to teach.
3. A host is like a host at a party: I find this a really useful metaphor.  A party has a emergent dynamic of its own – but this is a function of the people who are invited, the theme, the context it is held in and how it is facilitated by the host.  In the same way, a party can’t be ‘designed’ as much as planned.  You can influence the outcome but only have a limited degree of control.

c) Rules of engagement.  Although articulated in quite different ways and levels of verbosity, these are essentially the same thing.  Systems that facilitate communication between people need to provide a shared understanding of what is acceptable, which can vary vastly from community to community.  I would see less need for ‘rules of engagement’ when only document sharing is taking place as the conversation is much less articulated and direct so there is less chance for the kind of conflict that needs to be actively resolved.

Exercise 4.3: Social networking tools for your PLN

a)

i) Learning

My heuristics to judge how much a social networking site has potential as a platform for learning are:

• Topics of interest: Users should be able to create and  find topics of interest.  Topics should be able to be tagged by users to build up folksonomies.
• Asynchronous and persistent discussion: The system should allow asynchronous discussion to take place around a topic.  Discussion should be kept in an easily readable format that can be used by others who may not have been participants in the initial discussion for learning in the future.
• Searchable knowledge: Knowledge kept in the system should be able to be searched in multiple ways and returned in the form of meaningful results.

According to the heuristics above:

Platforms for Learning       Not platforms for learning (in a social context)

Facebook                               Yahoo

YouTube                                Bebo

Ning                                        Delicious (not directly)

LinkedIn                                Bubble.us

TeacherTube

Twitter

MySpace

RevYu

Flickr

SocialGo

Digg

Reddit

ii) Professional development in the workplace

My heuristics to judge how much a social networking site has potential as a platform for professional development in the workplace are:

• Independence from social utility: The system should not be able to be used for non-work-related social activity.
• Security: Knowledge built up by a network should be secure from the general public.

According to the heuristics above:

Platforms for prof development       Not platforms for prof development

Ning                                                        Everything else!

Social Go

b) I’ve created a profile on Bebo and Ning.  Ning was straight forward – Bebo on the hand wanted my life story!

c) I had never thought of it in those terms but I guess I do have a personal learning network.  I am a regular user of Facebook, Flickr, Skype, Twitter, Gmail, Google Reader, Google Groups, Delicious and Wikipedia and a non-regular user of LinkedIn.  I maintain my own blog which is probably the most onerous in terms of commitment among all of the platforms.  Generally, the closer a network is to ‘real life’, the harder it is to build and maintain.  This is why people need to spend hours on such sites.  Something like delicious on the other hand can be used immediately with no ‘investment’, but you are unlikely to find a new job or reconnect with someone you have lost touch with – so the effort reflects the significance of what you get out of it.  This also applies to low-commitment ‘networks’ such as what you might build on Google reader.  This is essentially a one-way conversation, as useful as it is and is a much weaker use of the term network.

Kim, Amy Jo 2000a Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities pp xiii-xiv PeachPit Press ISBN 0-201-87484-9

Kim, Amy Jo 2000b Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities pp xv-xvi PeachPit Press ISBN 0-201-87484-9

Topic 3 – Augmented reality, gaming and mobile computing

Exercise 3.1: The battle for Wesnoth

The ‘learn-by-doing’ interactive tutorial was engaging and informative.  I did run into problems on my mac however when I was asked to right-click and didn’t seem to be able to use ctrl to replicate this.  This actually stopped me from being able to recruit additional fighters and I found myself on the losing end in my first battle with the Orcs!

Exercise 3.2: Mobile computing research

What is the educational value of online mobile games and mobile social network access?

Online mobile games and mobile social network access allow students to learn in more direct, engaging ways and access information in ways that are less abstract and more related true to their context.

Don Norman (2004, pp. 129-133) deals with the use of games for education in his book Emotional Design.  He contrasts their traditional role of “mindless sport for teenage boys” with their 21st century potential for training and education.  He also makes the point that games used to involve single individuals but more and more are involving “groups, sometimes scattered across the world.  Communicating through computer networks.”

In their excellent literature review of games and learning, Kirriemuir & McFarlane (2004) argue that the current concept of “a sugar-coating fun” over educational material needs to give way to the design of educational games that offer the full engagement and sense of flow offered by today’s ‘non-educational’ computer games.  As an interesting point on social networking, they bring attention to the fact that the proportion of female gamers is growing and this may be due to the increase in social gaming.

Eric Klopfer (2008) takes this a step further by applying these ideas specifically to the use of mobile devices in a classroom context.  He argues that the mobile platform is ideal for learning games for all levels of education from primary school to university due to its portability, context sensitivity, connectivity and ubiquity.

A compelling example of the possibilities of of both mobile gaming and social networking for learning can best be seen in the new generation of augmented iPhone applications that are literally just being made available (officially available with iPhone OS 3.1 but available through Yelp as an Easter egg as of 26th Aug 2009).  AcrossAir is a real application for teaching people about London’s underground that will be available soon (http://www.acrossair.com/apps_nearesttube.htm).  Augmented ID is a concept video showing how social networking information might be integrated into augmented reality (http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/augmented_id_augmented_reality_facial_recognition.php).

Norman, D. A. (2004). Emotional Design. New York: Basic Books.

Klopfer, E. (2008).  Augmented learning. The MIT Press.

Kirriemuir, J., & McFarlane, A.  (2004).  Literature Review in Games and Learning.  FutureLab Series: Report 8.

Topic 2 – Virtual environments and cognition

Exercise 2.1: Virtual environments and cognition

I joined Facebook in 2007 and enjoyed the initial ‘honeymoon’ period when I got excited every time I got a new friend.  It didn’t take long before I crossed the threshold whereby there was just too much noise (which I personally think is around 30) and I was being notified of what people who’s names I could hardy remember were having for dinner.

I searched for CSU and got back a number of results, one of which was Colarado State University.  This prompted me to update my search to the specific “Charles Sturt University” which returned 108 results.  The first retrieved looked the most promising and had 710 members.  I joined and made it 711.  I then found ITC510 (after a couple of attempts – my mistake was to prepend CSU to the beginning of my search) and became the group’s 16th member.

a. I don’t have an ethical problem with Facebook.  You need to accept an invitation before someone can see anything truly personal or have you appear as a friend so I don’t see any issues.  The advertising is obviously quite well targeted to the information that you’ve provided as part of your registration – particularly your sex, age and location – although the groups that you use must almost certainly come into the equation as well.  My only issue would perhaps be with advertising to facebook’s younger audience – particularly when such detailed information is being used to manipulate such young and impressionable minds.

b. The University College London’s Visual Cognition Group is primarily concerned with “detection, discrimination and short-term memory of visual stimuli” (UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, 2009).  Social cognition on the other hand describes how people process social information (“Social Cognition”, n.d.).  There is a close relationship between these two things as visual cognition will provide input for our social cognition, but is only one aspect of what drives our interaction with other people.  It is interesting to note that damage to the Fusiform gyrus in the frontal lobe can lead to the inability to recognise faces – an excellent example of where a breakdown in visual cognition could adversely affect social cognition.

Exercise 2.2: Virtual worlds and citizenship

Downloaded, installed and setup and account for second life. The concept of a starting look was useful as it lowered the barrier to entry.  After spending a few minutes exploring the many options for customising the appearance of my avatar I walked around the help island before removing my pants for a laugh and finding myself unable to put them back on.  I chatted to some of the other avatars but they were unable to help me with my lack of pants!

I used the search facility to teleport to IBM’s island and read some of their marketing billboards before finally finishing up at a party island where a large number of people were dancing to music that I couldn’t seem to here.

I found that the most engaging aspect of the experience was the fact that the other people in the game were really there – in a real, dynamic way.  It changed the nature of the interaction and I find myself behaving more as I would if I were actually there.  I think that this is where social cognition plays a big part.  The way that you respond to this type of environment is very different to something like a chat room and has much to with the way that our brains are wired to process social stimuli.  By creating an environment that resembles certain aspects of reality, this type of social network can tap into our natural social cognitive makeup to elicit specific types of experiences.

I also visited the Second Life Grid microsite.  This reveals much about Linden’s strategy – which seems to be going beyond gaming and their own development by ambitiously providing a framework in which companies can build their own virtual worlds.  They are also positioning Second Life as a platform for meetings, interviews and orientation for new hires.  I was a little skeptical at first but watched the video showing Ernst & Young’s cookie factory for training of their auditors.

Exercise 2.3: Create and record your online persona

Discussing the way in which we project ourselves to others reminds me of an excellent brand guidelines parody I saw last year from a graphic designer who had presented a brand style guide document – of the type typically created for corporates – for himself.  This can be downloaded in PDF format at identitystudios.co.uk.

The construction of my Facebook profile is something that I have been doing since joining in early 2007.  This is comprised of obvious things such as your profile photo and the applications that you choose to feature on your page.  It is also made up of more subtle and transient things such as the content and tone of status updates, photo comments and wall posts.  As Facebook is primarily a social environment for me, analysing my Facebook avatar is an exercise in analysing what I attempt to project socially.  My photos are informal and usually show me enjoying myself in some social context.  Most of my posts are jokes and reflect my attempts at a good sense of humour.  Again, my applications are novelty-based and added for their humour value.

The construction of my Second Life avatar was far more focused on its physical aspects.  This is simply a function of the visual nature of the environment – and someone only briefly dabbling in it doesn’t have the persistent artifacts such as photos and wall posts to worry about.  It seems that in an environment with no limitations, the men are all tall and muscled and the woman scantily clad and large-breasted.  I however was inclined to make my avatar look like my real-life self.  I’m not sure whether this is a reflection on my healthy self-esteem or simply a sign of my laziness!

I would say that I don’t have a persistent avatar across my ‘virtual’ social networks and environments.  This is for the same reason that I don’t have a persistent persona in my ‘real’ interactions.  I see this as a natural function of judging social feedback and adjusting yourself accordingly.  The way that I project myself at work is different (however subtle) from when with my friends which is again different to when with my family.  I think an excellent example of this is the fact that many people I know are feeling awkward as Facebook’s recent influx of the older users has them receiving friend requests from their mothers (“Facebook demographics: biggest growth in older users”, n.d).

Exercise 2.4: Online identity and your state of presence

Dick Hardt speaks about the history of online identity and the new approach that his company (among others) is taking to it.  His ideas are very much centred around issues of security and authentication – and although he explicitly mentions the word persona (and personi!), what he is describing has more to do with the mechanics of online registration and authentication than the actual persona that we choose project online.  I feel that the sets of information that his company’s technology enables to be shared are extremely reduced attributes that are at a lower level than those that truly define my persona for a given community.  To use examples from earlier in this topic, my Facebook persona may be quite different to that of my Second Life persona and even more different to my LinkedIn persona – but the information that could be shared by a system such as Hardt’s would in fact be the same between all 3.  Attributes such as name, date of birth, address, credit card number etc do not go very far to describing something as subtle and evolving as an online persona.

Hardt’s mentions of phishing, pharming, privacy invasion and identity theft was extremely brief and I failed to grasp how his solution made this better (I would in fact have expected it to make it worse given the fact that everything about you can be packaged up and sent via your browser without you – or however is using your browser – having to ‘manually’ identify yourself).

Phishing describes the practice of creating fake sites and using various means by which to get unsuspecting users to visit them and provide sensitive details such as banking credentials.  The most common example of this is the ubiquitous email from your bank asking you to ‘confirm’ your login details.

Pharming is a more automated means to achieving similar ends to phishing.  This involves manipulating the technologies that route traffic – particularly hosts files and DNS servers.  Recently, the machine I was using at work had a hosts file had been tampered with and many major sites had their domains redirected to spurious IP addresses.  Unlike phishing, pharming cannot be detected by a dodgy address in the browser address bar.

Privacy invasion is a broader theme than a specific practice.  Email harvesters which are then used to send unsolicited spam messages to someone’s email address are an example of privacy invasion.  Other examples my include situations where someone is able to find out information about you that you would rather keep private – this may even be basic things such as your date of birth.  This stencil are from Banksy springs to mind when I think of privacy invasion:

Banksy's "What are you looking at" piece

Identity theft is the act of doing something whilst pretending to be someone else.  This is usually mentioned in the context of financial fraud.  A personal example of this would be when my credit card was maxed out by someone buying domestic airline flights.  They were clever about it and only left a very short amount of time between booking and flying.  Luckily for me the credit card company footed the bill.

Visual Cognition Group. (n.d).  Retrieved August 17, 2009, from http://www.icn.ucl.ac.uk/Research-Groups/Visual-Cognition-Group/.

Social Cognition. (n.d.).  Retrieved August 17, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cognition.

Facebook demographics: biggest growth in older users. (n.d.).  Retrieved Aug 22, 2009, from http://ebiquity.umbc.edu/blogger/2009/07/09/facebook-demographics-biggest-growth-in-older-users/.

Topic 1 – Underlying principles

Exercise 1: What is social networking.

When I think social networking I immediately think a) Facebook and then b) Linked In.  It is a recent phenomenon and almost seems like a fad – much like something such as reality TV.  In reality though, people have been using computers to facilitate social interaction for decades, usually a virtual form of something that already exists in ‘physical’ space.

As I mentioned in my introduction post, although I have already designed a site that facilitates a community – it did so in a fairly static way.  And as I am in the UX game, I am really hoping to gain a better understanding of the cognitive and social aspects of online communities.  A study into online communities and social networks will certainly change my professional practice by providing a framework from which to design interfaces and interactions in my day-to-day job.

Boxes and arrows is an online user experience magazine which I often refer to in my professional life and it has an interesting article titled “Social networks and group formation” (Singh, 2007).  In this article Singh discusses tie strength (strong, weak and absent) and then outlines the 3 competing theories for measuring centralisation (the importance of someone in a social network): Degree of point, control and independence.  In defining social networks he quotes Garton et al. (1997) as saying “a set of people (or organizations or other social entities) connected by a set of social relationships, such as friendship, co-working or information exchange.”

I didn’t find it as easy to come across good articles for online communities as for social networks so running out of time, couldn’t find a better source than wikipedia.  It used the definition (“Virtual community”, n.d.) “a group of people that primarily interact via communication media such as newsletters, telephone, email, internet social network service or instant messages rather than face to face, for social, professional, educational or other purposes.”

In terms of developing online communities (as opposed to just supporting them), I think social network platforms provide the opportunity to build the weak links that really provide value to its participants.

Exercise 2: Social networking taxonomy.

I first really considered the concept of folksonomy when designing Barclaycard last year (http://www.barclaycard.co.uk/mybarclaycard/preview/).  One of the underpinning concepts of this design is the ability to analyse your credit card transactions to get a better understanding of your spending.  By matching merchant ID’s to transactions, we were able to create categories for transactions which could then be presented to users as a visual representation of their credit card statements (e.g. pie chart of their spending broken into groceries, bills, entertiainment etc).  In addition to this ‘pre-canned’ taxonomy for categorising transactions, we also allowed users to create their own tags for their transactions.  By then making these custom tags available to others in similar circumstances (e.g. informing a user that most people tagged transactions from a particular merchant as health care), a ‘Folksonomy’ was able to emerge which was a taxonomy created by all of the users of the system rather than engineered up-front.  The tag cloud seems to be one of the information design devices of choice when visualising folksonomies.

My categorisation/tagging scheme is my current social networking taxonomy but I expect that as I read the blogs of my fellow students that I will see categories and tags that I think make sense for a given topic and evolve my scheme accordingly.  This is a rudimentary form of folksonomy but still one all the same.

Exercise 3: An heuristic experience

1. I have chosen to review barclays.co.uk as this is the public site of the online banking system that I am currently designing.

2. Ran through the form – it would have been helpful to have more description information in context.  Even as someone who does these types of reviews fairly regularly I still always refer to it for clarification and examples.

3. Results are as follows:

Subject: Barclays public site: Nielsen’s Heuristic Evaluation
Sender: andrew.wight@gmail.com
From: andrew.wight@gmail.com (NHE)

system=Barclays public site
date=2009-08-11 17:15:40
comment=Heuristic evaluation of barclays.co.uk for ITC510
q1=6
c1=Follows typical conventions
q2=5
c2=Terms are typically simple and user-centric,
q3=6
c3=User’s current location in the site is well sign posted
q4=7
c4=Pages follow a consistent template
q5=6
q6=0
q7=5
c7=Login on homepage but no specific goal-oriented links
q8=
c8=Error messages are not specific enough
q9=5
c9=Error messages are immediate (rather than later in the process).  Better contextual help would prevent them further
q10=6
c10=Thorough help system – could be better utilzed inline rather than as a separate section.

Singh, S. (2007). Social Networks and group formation: Theoretical concepts to leverage. Retreived 6 August, 2009, from http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/social-networks.

Virtual community. (n.d.).  Retreived 6 August, 2009, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_community.