Reading:

• "Virtual Communites are Communites: Web Surfers Don't Ride Alone" by Barry Wellman and Milena Gulia (in Smith & Kollock)
• "Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital" by Robert Putnam (electronic reserve)
• A New Perspective on "Community" and its Implications for Computer-Mediated Communication Systems by Amy Bruckman. Works in Progress, CHI 2006.

Online Sites:

• Explore two or three class cowebs
• Meetup
• Dodgeball

Reading:

• The Great Good Place by Ray Oldenburg, chapters one and two.
• Introduction and The Heart of the Well, in The Virtual Community, by Howard Rheingold.
• "And Now?" in Cyberville by Stacy Horn, pp. 1-11.

Online Site:

• LambdaMOO, following these instructions.

Reading:

• Interviewing as Qualitative Research, by IE Seidman.

Online Sites you should already know, but just in case:

Due:

• Short paper on best and worst experiences

Reading:

• Teaching Students to Study Online Communities Ethically by Amy Bruckman. Journal of Information Ethics 15:2, 82-98, fall 2006.
• Studying the Amateur Artist by Amy Bruckman
• Georgia Tech's IRB information (browse)
• Ethics for midterm projects summary

Recommended:

• "Go Away":Participants Objections to Being Studied and the Ethics of Chatroom Research by Jim Hudson and Amy Bruckman. The Information Society, 20:127-139, 2004
• The Belmont Report
• US Title 45 Regulations
• Psychological Research Online: Opportunities and Challenges, by Bob Kraut et al

Online Site:

• Puzzle Pirates

Due:

• Obtain ethics certification via the online course, if you do not already have certification.

Please do not miss this class. If you do miss this lecture, you must meet with the instructor.

Discuss midterm project ideas

Due:

• Midterm project proposals due

Reading:

• Finding One's Own Space in Cyberspace, by Amy Bruckman
• Communicative Subtlety in Multimedia Chat by John Suler
• Design Principles for Online Communities by Peter Kollock
• Nine Principles of Community Design by Amy Jo Kim

Online Site:

• The Palace
• Habbo

Reading:

• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman. Pages 1-58, intro & most of chapter 1.
• The Kid With All the News About the TV News New York Times article

Online Sites:

• Dooce
• TVNewser
• Mashable

Reading:

• Aspects of the Self," in Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle (chapter 7)
• Identity and Deception in the Virtual Community by Judith Donath

Online Site:

• Whyville

Reading:

• "The Strange Case of the Lectronic Lover," by Lindsey Van Gelder (electronic reserve)
• "Boyz and Gurlz" in Cyberville by Stacy Horn
• "TinySex and Gender Trouble", in Life on the Screen by Sherry Turkle (chapter 8)
• Gender Swapping on the Internet by Amy Bruckman

Online Site:

• iVillage

Reading:

• Papers by Amy Bruckman:
  • Cyberspace is Not Disneyland
  • The MediaMOO Project: Constructionism and Professional Community
  • Community Support for Constructionist Learning
• "Battle Lessons: What the Generals Don't Know" by Dan Baum in The New Yorker Magazine - Jan 17, 2005, pg 42-48 (electronic reserve)

Online Site:

• Newgrounds

Reading:

• "Cybrids" by Peter Anders (electronic reserve)
• Marcos Novak's Website (skim; parts are broken)
• Read "Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace" (electronic reserve). Skim beginning. Read carefully from page 248 to the end.

Recommended:

• "How did My Garden Grow" (Chapter 5) in "My Tiny Life" by Julian Dibbell

Online Site:

• Activeworlds

Reading:

• Do Artifacts Have Politics? by Langdon Winner. (in The Whale and The Reactor)
• Code v2.0 by Lawrence Lessig. Chapters one through eight. (Available free online, but you may wish to buy it anyway.)

Recommended:

• Slash(dot) and Burn: Distributed Moderation in a Large Online Conversation Space by Cliff Lampe and Paul Resnick

Online Site:

• Slashdot

Reading:

• A Rape in Cyberspace (or chapter 1 of "My Tiny Life") by Julian Dibbell
• Approaches to Managing Deviant Behavior in Virtual Communities, panel, CHI 94, by Amy Bruckman, Pavel Curtis, Cliff Figallo, and Brenda Laurel
• Managing Deviant Behavior in Online Communities., panel, CHI 2006. Amy Bruckman, Catalina Danis, Cliff Lampe, Janet Sternberg, and Chris Waldron.
• "Banished!" and "Who Let the Nazi In?" (chapters 7 and 8) in Cyberville by Stacy Horn, pp. 157-220. (electronic reserve)

Recommended:

• "The Purple Guest" (Chapter 3) in "My Tiny Life" by Julian Dibbell

Online Sites:

• USENET (google groups)
• alt.feminism
• soc.feminism

Reading:

• Lessons from LucasFilm's Habitat, by Chip Morningstar and F. Randall Farmer. (In Cyberspace, First Steps.)
• LambdaMOO Takes a New Direction (LTAND)
• Governance, chapter 9 of Synthetic Worlds by Edward Castronova (electronic reserve)
• AOL Terms of Service (skim)
• AOL vulgarity guidelines (1995)
• AOL's Secret Dirty Words List by Jordanne Holyoak
• AOL Agreement to rules of user conduct

Online Site:

• teenwire

Reading:

• "Roles: from Newcomer to Old-Timer" and "Leadership: The Buck Stops Here." Chapters 4 & 5 in Community Building on the Web by Amy Jo Kim (electronic reserve)
• Hearts, Clubs, Diamonds, Spades: Players Who Suit MUDs by Richard Bartle

Recommended:

• Cyberspace Innkeeping by John Coate
• The WELL Hosts manual (Section 2)
• The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online by Howard Rheingold

Online Site:

• ThirdAge

Due:

• Midterm papers

Online Site:

• Second Life
  Start using the site, in preparation for our class on it on 3/27.

Reading:

• "Lurker demographics: counting the silent" by Blair Nonnecke and Jenny Preece. Proceedings of CHI 2000, April 1 - 6, 2000, The Hague, Netherlands, pp. 73-80.
• Becoming Wikipedian: Transformation of Participation in a Collaborative Online Encyclopedia. by Susan Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman. Proceedings of Group 2005.
• "Alone together?": exploring the social dynamics of massively multiplayer online games by Nicolas Ducheneaut et al. Proceedings of CHI 2006. (electronic reserve)

Online Site:

• The Wikipedia

Reading:

• Find an article about Second Life. Add it to the list on the coweb, making sure no one has picked it yet. Try to find a scholarly article rather than a popular press one if you can. Come to class prepared to summarize your article and discuss why it is interesting.

Online Site:

• Second Life
  Please spend at least 5 hours on the site. Make one simple object.

Reading:

• Beyond Concern: Understanding Net Users' Attitudes About Online Privacy by Lorrie Faith Cranor, Joseph Reagle, and Mark S. Ackerman
• Best Data Practices for Online Service Providers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation
• "Privacy policies as decision-making tools, an evaluation of online privacy notices." by Carlos Jensen and Colin Potts. Proceedings of CHI 2004. (electronic reserve)

Online Site:

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Privacy (browse)
• Read the privacy policies of two online sites you use. List your sites on the coweb, making sure no one else in the class has picked your sites. Come to class prepared to discuss those policies.

Reading:

• PICs: Internet Access Controls Without Censorship by Paul Resnick and James Miller
• American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom
Explore the site generally. Make sure to read the ALA statement on Internet filtering
• The Internet Filter Assessment Project (TIFAP)
• National Center for Missing and Exploited Children brochure on Child Safety on the Information Superhighway

Recommended:

• W3C resource pages on PICS and RDF

Online Sites:

• From this list of Internet filters, pick two filters and see if you can use the developer's website to figure out how they work and what criteria they use for filtering.
• Neopets

Guest Lecturer: Lynda Mitchell

Reading and Listening:

• "Online Campaign Sparks Interest in New Disease" (Listen to NPR Story)
• "Munchausen by Internet" by Marc D. Feldman (online reserve)

Online Site:

• Kids with Food Allergies

Reading:

• The Economies of Online Cooperation by Peter Kollock (in Smith and Kollock)
• The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond

Online Site:

• SourceForge
• Creative Commons

• Kaneva
• Chris Klaus Channel on Kaneva

Due:

• Final papers