Course Overview

This course is intended to help students to analyze online interaction environments with an eye toward design. For the purpose of this course, a community is defined as a group of people who sustain interaction over time. The group may be held together by a common identity, a collective purpose, or merely by the individual utility gained from the interactions. An online interaction environment is an electronic forum, accessed through computers or other electronic devices, in which community members can conduct some or all of their interactions. We will use the term eCommunity as shorthand, both for communities that conduct all of their interactions online and for communities that use on-line interaction to supplement face-to-face interactions.

 
Two main threads will weave through the course. One thread will be concerned with the practical issues of design and use of online tools to support communities, and how choices that must be made in design can impact the function and style of the resulting community. The second thread will focus on psychological and economic theories that provide a frame to better understand communities in general. These theoretical pieces will provide a lens for better understanding the implications of choices made on the more practical level. The topics, readings, and technologies for each week can be found at the Course Schedule.

The doctoral "shadow" course, 884, prepares students to conduct research on on-line communities.