Umbrella Project - Ideas and Tasks

Members

Kyuhan Koh, Jane Meyers, Jeff Hoehl, Catharine Starbird, Antonio González, Olga Liskin, George McCabe, Walter Mahfuz, Mikel King

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.

Researching other Socially Networking Programming Environments

Scratch. Alice. Squeak. New design for socially networked programming.

Social Creativity through Google Sketchup and 3D warehouse I'm not sure this is the right place we are supposed to wrap up our final paper. We have Olga's group report here.

Bringing it Together

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.

Materials/Links

• Project Presentation on Monday

Tasks

Storytelling

research - background
creating / deploying / seeding
scraping
OVERLAP - analyzing
  survey / feedback

flow of information / knowledge / active? collaboration
  motivations? willingness to participate

reflection
          

Code-building / sharing - classroom wiki

research - background
creating / distributing / reusing
Knowledge building and sharing
OVERLAP - analyzing
survey / Flow of Inspiration Priciples / knowledge / collaboration, competition, inspiration