MOCHI Summer Readings: Social Knowledge Construction July 19, 2006

"Social Knowledge Construction: Are we really smarter in groups?"

Come one, come all..... MOCHI would like to invite MOCHI members and
the general public to join us for our annual summer reading series.
The goal of the reading series is to use a set of interesting readings
and a casual atmosphere to spark discussion of interesting HCI related
topics.

Last month´s reading group was a big success. The change of venue to
the Starbucks on South University Street worked well. Lots of good
coffee and great conversation.

The next event will be on July 19th at 6:00. The topic will be "Social
Knowledge
Construction: Are we really smarter in groups?" The conversation will
focus on the proliferation of new community-based software systems,
such as Del.icio.us, Flickr, and Wikipedia that allow end users to
share and construct knowledge. Discussion topics are likely to include:
social benefits and risks; philosophical, computational and
psychological issues in knowledge representation; emerging (or missing)
design patterns, and new classes of applications.

As usual, we have some suggested readings (see below) but more
importantly we´d suggest that everyone try out one of these systems and
live with it for a while. Having a real user experience with these
systems will be more illuminating than any of the readings. If
possible, we´d encourage active participation and content creation, not
just consumption of existing content. A list of representative systems
is provided after the readings list.

Suggested readings include:

1) The Hive Mind: Folksonomies and User-Based Tagging by Ellyssa Kroski
at InfoTangle
http://infotangle.blogsome.com/2005/12/07/the-hive-mind-folksonomies-and-user-based-tagging/

2) What is Web 2.0 Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next
Generation of
Software, by Tim O´Reilly
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html

3) DIGITAL MAOISM: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism By Jaron Lanier
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html

and responses by contributors to Edge.Org
http://www.edge.org/discourse/digital_maoism.html

4) Categorization in Social Psychology (Chapter 1) by Craig McGarty
http://www.anu.edu.au/psychology/groups/categorisation/contents.php

5) Jimmy Wales - Vision: Wikipedia and the Future of Free Culture
6) Clay Shirky - Making Digital Durable: What Time Does to Categories

(free downloadable lectures)
http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/

Suggested applications.

1) Del.icio.us - Social Bookmarking. This is probably the best site to
start with.
http://del.icio.us/

2) Flickr - Photo sharing.
http://www.flickr.com/

3) Wikepedia - Encyclopedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

4) 43Things - To do list
http://www.43things.com/

5) Technorati - Blog post contents
http://www.technorati.com/

6) LibraryThing - Library sharing
http://www.librarything.com

Read (or try out) as many or as few as you like, RSVP if you can, but
come and join the
discussion!

Suggestions for other readings for this topic, or great ideas for
future topics are much appreciated.