Pre-requisites

SI 501 and SI 504. 502 is a co-requisite, meaning that it can be taken at the same time as this course. In particular, students need:

• From 501, students need to have learned how to observe, interview, and/or do surveys in order to elicit user needs. Students will use these skills as appropriate to the study of the community they choose.
• From 504, students should be familiar with concepts such as roles, norms, and routines. They also need to have developed sophistication about how information collections and social systems coevolve. The Wenger text for this course is very dense and relies heavily on concepts such as codetermination, coevolution, and dualities, concepts that will be far easier to understand after students have taken 504.
• From 502, students need to understand the concepts of public goods, information asymmetry, and opportunity costs. It is OK to take 502 concurrently with this course.

Students who convince themselves and the instructor that they have equivalent preparation on these dimensions can waive the formal pre-requisites.

In addition, students need to know what kinds of tools are available to support distributed, synchronous and asynchronous communication (e.g., chat, instant messaging, message boards, audio and video conferencing, live application sharing). Students who are unfamiliar with these but are comfortable learning new technologies on their own will have the opportunity to explore these at their own pace. This course will spend very little time explicitly teaching about technology, but will frequently assume it as background.