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