Course News

Lecture - Thursday March 27

This should be of interest to a few of you, and is especially relevant to the concerns of this class. I encourage those of you that can to go - if you write a 100+ word blog response, you'll even get extra credit.

SHAPING THE AGE OF USER-GENERATED CONTENT

Amy Bruckman, Georgia Institute of Technology

Thursday, Mar 27, 2008, 11:00 am, 2405 Siebel Center

ABSTRACT:
In the mid 1990s, we began to ask some hopeful questions about the potential of the Internet to empower the individual: Can users become creators of content, rather than merely recipients? What can people learn through working on personally meaningful projects and sharing them online? If content creation is to some degree democratized, does this have broader cultural or political implications? This enthusiasm faded a bit by the dot-com bust, and many began to wonder: will it be business-as-usual after all?

But then it started happening. On Wikipedia, thousands of volunteers collaborate to create a shared resource that, while not without flaws, is astonishing in its breadth and speed of adaptation. Furthermore, the process of writing this resource is truly collaborative to a degree that should make any Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) professional envious. On MySpace, teens create their own web pages, sharing snippets of html and expressing themselves in a quintessentially teenage fashion. Blogs written by ordinary citizens have become influential in politics and culture, almost just as envisioned by science fiction writer Orson Scott Card. User-generated content, it seems, has arrived.

Of course for every thoughtful photo essay shared by a budding young photographer, the Internet has a hundred self-broadcast photos of under-age drinking. What percentage of Internet traffic, one wonders, is devoted to flirting and gossiping? And how much have the last few years increased the world's stockpile of really bad poetry?

In this talk, I'll review the history of user-generated content on the Internet, and present current research in the Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) Lab at Georgia Tech that aims to help shape this phenomenon. Drawing on work in the fields of online community design, CSCW, and computer-supported cooperative learning, I'll discuss how we can design Internet-based environments conducive to creativity, collaboration, and learning.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:
Amy Bruckman is Associate Professor of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Her Electronic Learning Communities (ELC) research group studies online communities and education. Amy is interested in ethical issues in Internet research, and was a member of the working groups on this topic organized by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychological Association. Amy received her Ph.D. from the MIT Media Lab in 1997. In 2002, she was awarded the Jan Hawkins Award for Early Career Contributions to Humanistic Research and Scholarship in Learning Technologies.

posted by ryan griffis at 8:28 PM Tuesday, March 25, 2008

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Lecture - Thursday March 27

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