Social computing

Draft

Definitions

Social computing refers to systems which support collective gathering, representation, processing and dissemination of information.

“Social computing refers to the use of social software, a growing trend in ICT usage of tools that support social interaction and communication. Social computing is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts online through the use of software and technology. Examples of social computing include the use of e-mail for maintaining social relationships, instant messaging for daily microcoordination at one's workplace, or weblogs as a community building tool.” (Wikipedia Social computing, retrieved 13:13, 14 September 2006 (MEST))

Social computing refers to systems which support the gathering, representation, processing and dissemination of social information, that is, information which is distributed across social collectivities such as teams, communities, organizations, cohorts and markets. Examples of systems which fall in this domain include collaborative filtering and recommender systems (e.g., firefly), online auction sites (e.g., ebay), and open source virtual communities (e.g., slashdot). The central hallmark of social computing is that it relies on the notion of social identity: that is, it is not just the data that matters, but who that data 'belongs to', and how the identity of the 'owner' of that data is related to other identities in the system. More generally, social computing systems are likely to contain components that support and represent social constructs such as identity, reputation, trust, accountability, presence, social roles, and ownership.

IBM Social Computing Group FAQ retrieved 19:04, 26 May 2006 (MEST).

Types and issues of social computing

Social computing can be described in terms of social software types, for example:

• Social syndication of contents and links
• Social network (professional, dating)
• Citation systems that, for a given publication, list citations (with links) and other publications within which it is cited. In addition, there can be metrics.

Issues related to social computing are:

• Trust and reputation metrics
• Prediction systems
• Metadata and tagging systems
• Filterning and visualization algorithms and implementations
• Social presence

Social computing in education patterns

See also learning e-porfolios that do have social computing potential.

To enhance social presence

• Garrison and Anderson developed an according model of e-learning that they refer to as the Community of inquiry model

• Social networking according to interests, e.g. like in FOAF could allow students to find fellows with similar interests and get engaged different sorts of informal (and later formal) collaboration.

Links sharing and social navigation

See social bookmarking and social navigation for the technology

With systems that bookmark and make a saveguard copy like Furl:

“Sharing personally classified bookmarks among teachers and with other learners to cover a study area. Collaborative filtering and social navigation facilitates new discoveries. Teachers and librarians can already create pre-selected and tagged lists of resources for learners to browse, and be sure that they are found again, as a copy is saved by the system. Bookmarks based on a tag can be aggregated and posted through Web-feeds to learners' and other teachers' blogs or websites focusing in a given area. Commenting and rating on bookmarked urls can be used for recommending as well as for helping decisionmaking and critical thinking.” (Vuorikari, 2005: 6)

With systems like del.icio.us: “Collaborative collection of links tagged with keywords is facilitated, and they can all be browsed and viewed at once (social navigation) or distributed through Web-feeds. Also, creating related tags is easy, giving more leverage for more elaborated categories.” (Vuorikari, 2005: 6)

To share resources

• Applications like Flickr: “Learners can share images that they have created or integrate in their works (photos, image manipulation, maps,..) to be used in different learning situations from authentic geography to art lessons. Social networks can be built around images through connecting learners, tutors and teachers together via shared tags. Pictures can constitute an important network of distributed repositories for images.”(Vuorikari, 2005: 6)

Blogsheres

• Blog search engines like Technorati can be used to track blog postings on certain tags. It also shows who is linking to an entry allowing to follow the whole distributed discussion that happens in the whole blogsphere.

• RSS aggregators like RSS4You allow teachers or students to prepare and share favorite RSS feeds.

Technology

• See social software

Links

• IBM Social Computing Group, HTML. Several good papers online.

• Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research

• Wikipedia Socialcomputing

• "Our" Nicola Nova's Pasta & Vinegar Blog (probably the best overall news resource on some areas of social and ubiquitous computing).

References

• Nagele, Chris, Social Networks Report, Wilbit, PDF, retrieved 19:08, 14 September 2006 (MEST).

• Roush, Wade, (2005), Social Machines - Computing means connecting. Technology Review, MIT. HTML

• Vuorikari, Riina (2005), Social networking software and e-portfolios foster digitallearning networks, Special Insight Reports, European Schoolnet. HTML

• Vuorikari, Riina (2005), Innovation Brief: Can personal digital knowledge artefact's managment and social networks enhance learning ? PDF