Northwestern University
Comm Studies 378
Mon/Wed 2:00-3:20pm; Fri 2:00-3:00pm
Frances Searle 2-107
Fall, 2016
Aaron Shaw (Professor)
Office location: Frances Searle Building, room 2-142
Office hours: Mon. 10am-12pm, Wed. 3:30-5:30pm, and by appointment
Jeremy Foote (Teaching Assistant)
Office location: Frances Searle Building, room 2-419
Office hours: Mon. 1-2pm, Fri. 3-4pm, and by appointment
Description
Objectives, requirements, assignments & grading
Policies
Schedule
This Web site contains all the most up-to-date information about this class. The schedule page contains the day-to-day details you'll probably need most often.
Please email Aaron or Jeremy with any questions and make sure to
include [occ] in the subject line. This will help us keep track of
class-related messages and respond more promptly.
Many of the most innovative and ground-breaking organizations today are online "peer production" communities and crowds. Distributed groups collaborate over the Internet to write free encyclopedias (Wikipedia), launch social movements (Avaaz, Change.org), create software (GNU/Linux), share music and films (the Pirate Bay), develop innovative products (CHDK), and conduct advanced scientific research (Zooniverse).
When and why do these efforts succeed? What motivates participants to join, contribute, and sustain these communities? How can online communities' and crowds' successes be harnessed and reproduced? What can be learned from their shortcomings?
This course presents an intensive and interdisciplinary introduction to the study of online communities and crowds, with a particular emphasis on how and why some of these systems are so wildly effective at mobilizing and organizing people in ways that seem to have been impossible a few decades ago. Throughout the quarter, we will analyze these and other conceptual puzzles, studying many different communities in the process. Readings and assignments will draw on current research in the social sciences (Communication, Sociology, Economics, Psychology), Human Computer Interaction, law, and social theory.
Please send questions, corrections, or concerns to
Aaron Shaw and make
sure to include [occ] in the subject line.
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