Project Initial Presentation
Last modified by Hal Eden on 2010/08/20 11:33
First Presentation
Umbrella Project: Motivations
Description
Our "Umbrella" Project looks to examine, compare, and contrast motivations for contribution in two different environments. Storytelling in social networks We want to study what motivates individuals to actively participate in social networks, possibly by studying participation on YouTube and/or Facebook. By actively we mean that individuals not only browse content but actively respond and maintain interest for at least a short period of time. We want to examine existing participation activities and then seed discussions, varying both context and framing, and measuring the differences between contributions.Game Creation in a Classroom Environment with a Public Wiki We will explore the factors motivating students in classroom with the ideas of 'open designed classroom'. The course, game programming for education purpose offered by Dr. Lewis and Dr. Repenning would be used for this class project. Unlike traditional classroom, students can share their assignments, feedback, and rate each other in this course. Similarly to other web 2.0 sites, students collaborate actively or at least passively for their assignments. We want to observe which factor encourages students to engage and/or contribute in the class actively and collaborate each other.
The main goal of our project is to gain a better understanding of what motivates people to actively participate both in online, social networking environments and in the classroom. In the social networking environment we define "active" as either the creation of new content, the reuse of existing content, or a response to existing content. Within the classroom, "active" participation is defined as the sharing and reuse of existing work. Although these projects are quite different our goal is to study these environments in parallel analyze them with similar techniques, and draw conclusions that universal to motivation and also those distinct to the individual domains. A significant overlap between both projects will be determining systems to analyze the flow of contributions. In the social networking environment, these contributions will build on each other, creating an artifact or a series of artifacts. In the class programming environment, each student has the ability to see the contributions of other students and to borrow and reuse their code. In both environments there is a flow of knowledge and creation. We will have to develop a mechanism or mechanisms to locate and analyze this creativity flow.
Objectives
- We hope to find out the best factors or good factors which motivate people to contribute actively to systems/platforms based on Web 2.0.
Rationale
[Kate] - My current research centers around the idea of creating a collaborative programming environment linked through an online social network. This work lies at the intersection of these two projects. Two areas of both projects that are of particular interest to me are the motivation to participate and the mechanism for measuring and analyzing contributions. [Jane] - I am particularly interested in the storytelling project but would like to see how motivations for active participation vary across the board and can possibly be fostered in different domains. The storytelling piece of this project provides an opportunity for us to study participation in existing social networks and communities, seed discussions, and analyze the differences in our findings. [Walter] - I'm interested in the two-dimensional (story-telling and code-building) results that this project will provide, mainly from a business angle. Motivation for participation can be translated into page-views, which is the most important metric for generating advertisement dollars. If the name of the game is Web 2.0, then this project should provide good insight - or a good starting point - for companies who are looking to gain market share. [Kyuhan] - I think it would be interesting to see how each student influences other students to do better in the class. What kinds of factors can motivate students to contribute more in class with the similar condition to web 2.0 sites? [Olga] - For me, this project is of particular interest because it explores how people are motivated and how they react to particular aspects that are supposed to motivate them (seeding, challenge, award). It has always been a goal for me to find that out because it is the most basic and important concept of participation and contribution. When one is thinking about participation, one tends to think about how to implement more helpful functionality or how to create a simple design etc., assuming that people will be motivated enough to participate. Now we might learn how to make this assumption true. [Jeff] - Users can now choose between an incredible number of communication methods using web technologies. Although many of these methods are very similar on a technical level, they each carry specific differences in social etiquette, expectations, and intent. Understanding why users contribute, and how they choose to do so, is essential to improving and encouraging such behavior. Researching how users will contribute to story-telling and game-development both provide an opportunity to see what technical modalities are used for various purposes and will hopefully reveal how best to cater to user goals in future contributions. [Antonio] - Both projects look for the motivations of users to participate in such environments, each one having different kinds and levels of users, so if we can come up with an hypothesis correlating both areas, maybe we will be able to extrapolate it to a wider range of environments and with this establish a good-basic list of motivation points for Web 2.0 sites. In particular, I really will like to see how and why people reuse code and why people makes something as simple as the "25 things about me" so popular over the Internet. [Mikel] I am interested in this project from the perspective of motivating users to participate. I think this project ties in very interesting questions about social and psychological reasoning behind motivation. I also think motivation of users is a very interesting subject from a business point of view. Facebook has become a phenomenon that is unrivaled. It will be interesting to see what the driving force was behind such a project/product.Possible Challenges
- Coordinating so many people
- Drawing meaningful parallels between the two projects
- Generating (the motivation for) contributions to our storytelling artifact
- Fully determining and understanding the motivation of end-users on a theoretical and practical level. Accurate data may not be available from simply analyzing the by-products and may require surveys, questionnaires, and/or simple interviews.
Relationship to the class topics
- New media (i.e web 2.0) brings different ways to increase the creativity of end-users. Now end-users are not merely consumers, but producers. Their role was just consuming the product produced by domain experts, but now they spread seeds with domain experts and re-distribute the seeds by themselves. This project allows us to examine the cycle,evolutionary growth, closely.