College of Information Science and Technology

Researchers in the learning sciences have long recognized the potential of online spaces to support learning activities; however, the pervasiveness of social media construction typically associated with "Web 2.0" represents a new context for the research of learning and instruction. Wikis, for example, have popularized a social approach to constructing knowledge that was very difficult to achieve with previous technologies. Social networking applications like Facebook that interconnect people according to social or semantic relationships have become integral features of student life. Multi-user synchronous environments like Second Life provide rich, immersive experiences as well as new forms of online community. Such applications are blooming in every corner of society, influencing the ways in which people learn and exchange with one another. These four papers present distinct research applications of such technologies, illustrating how they influence not only our methods, but affect the very nature of our questions and theoretical perspectives. We need to understand how technology-based avatars can support academic identity development and equitable learning in the face of negative stereotypes within domains like math and science .

How does "self-governance" happen in Wikipedia? Through in-depth interviews with eleven individuals who have held a variety of responsibilities in the English Wikipedia, we obtained rich descriptions of how various forces produce and regulate social structures on the site. Our analysis describes Wikipedia as an organization with highly refined policies, norms, and a technological architecture that supports organizational ideals of consensus building and discussion. We describe how governance in the site is becoming increasingly decentralized as the community grows and how this is predicted by theories of commons-based governance developed in offline contexts. The trend of decentralization is noticeable with respect to both content-related decision making processes and social structures that regulate user behavior.

Writing a book from which others can learn is itself a powerful learning experience. Based on this proposition, we have launched Science Online, a wiki to support learning in high school science classrooms through the collaborative production of an online science resource. Our approach to designing educational uses of technology is based on an approach to education called constructionism, which advocates learning by working on personally meaningful projects. Our research examines the ways that constructionism connects to collective models of knowledge production and learning such as Knowledge Building. In this paper, we explore ways that collaboration using wiki tools fits into the constructionist approach, we examine learning goals for youth growing up in a readwrite culture, and we discuss preliminary findings in an ongoing year-long study of Science Online in the classroom. Despite the radically open collaboration afforded by wiki, we observe that many factors conspired to stymie collaborative writing on the site. We expected to find cultural barriers to wiki adoption in schools. Unexpectedly, we are also finding that the design of the wiki tool itself contributed barriers to collaborative writing in the classroom.

This poster describes preliminary results from an ongoing investigation of student/faculty relationships in the online community Facebook. In spring of 2006, a survey was conducted in two large courses at a mid-sized public research university to understand how contact on Facebook was influencing student perceptions of faculty. We found that contact on Facebook had no impact on students' ratings of professors. We found it striking that one third of the students we surveyed did not believe that faculty should be present on the Facebook at all. Some raised concerns about identity management and privacy issues. We discuss the implications of these findings and the potential for further research in the area.

Wikipedia represents an intriguing new publishing paradigm-can it be used to engage students in authentic collaborative writing activities? How can we design wiki publishing tools and curricula to support learning among student authors? We suggest that wiki publishing environments can create learning opportunities that address four dimensions of authenticity: personal, real world, disciplinary, and assessment. We have begun a series of design studies to investigate links between wiki publishing experiences and writing-to-learn. The results of an initial study in an undergraduate government course indicate that perceived audience plays an important role in helping students monitor the quality of writing; however, students' perception of audience on the Internet is not straightforward. This preliminary iteration resulted in several guidelines that are shaping efforts to design and implement new wiki publishing tools and curricula for students and teachers.

Traditional activities change in surprising ways when computermediated communication becomes a component of the activity system. In this descriptive study, we leverage two perspectives on social activity to understand the experiences of individuals who became active collaborators in Wikipedia, a prolific, cooperatively-authored online encyclopedia. Legitimate peripheral participation provides a lens for understanding participation in a community as an adaptable process that evolves over time. We use ideas from activity theory as a framework to describe our results. Finally, we describe how activity on the Wikipedia stands in striking contrast to traditional publishing and suggests a new paradigm for collaborative systems.

When people learn that we have spoken to individuals who spend up to 30 hours a week volunteering their time to research and write for an open-content encyclopedia, we often hear the same question: "Why do they do it?" The fact that this encyclopedia does not provide bylines to credit authors for their hard work makes the scenario still less fathomable. Two rounds of interviews with 22 volunteer encyclopedia writers in the fall of 2004 and spring of 2005 revealed that, in some respects, the incentive system that motivates contributions to the opencontent encyclopedia Wikipedia resembles that of the scientific community. Like scientists, contributors to Wikipedia seek to collaboratively identify and publish true facts about the world. Research on the sociology of science provides a useful touchstone for considering the incentive systems embedded in the technology and culture of online communities of collaborative authorship. In this paper we describe some of our findings in the context of Latour and Woolgar's seminal work on the incentive systems that motivate publishing scientists. We suggest that minimizing reliance on "hard coded," stratified user privileges and providing indicators of engagement in desirable activities can help support the growth of incentive economies in online communities.

Traditional introductory computer science (CS) courses have had little success engaging non-computer science majors. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, where introductory CS courses are a requirement for CS majors and nonmajors alike, two tailored introductory courses were introduced as an alternative to the traditional course. The results were encouraging: more nonmajors succeeded (completed and passed) in tailored courses than in the traditional course, students expressed fewer negative reactions to the course content, and many reported that they would be interested in taking another tailored CS course. The authors present findings from a pilot study of the three courses and briefly discuss some of the issues surrounding the tailored courses for nonmajors: programming, context, choice of language, and classroom culture.

There is growing interest in computing courses for non-CS majors. We have recently built such a course that has met with positive response. We describe our design process, which includes involvement of stakeholders and identifying a context that facilitates learning. We present evaluation results on success rates (approximately 90% of the students earn an A, B, or C) and impact of the course on students over time (80% report that the class has influenced them more than a semester later).

As the skills that constitute literacy evolve to accommodate digital media, computer science education finds itself in a sorry state. While students are more in need of computational skills than ever, computer science suffers dramatically low retention rates and a declining percentage of women and minorities. Studies of the problem point to the overemphasis in computer science classes on abstraction over application, technical details instead of usability, and the stereotypical view of programmers as loners lacking creativity. In spring 2003, Georgia Institute of Technology trialed a new course, Introduction to Media Computation, which teaches programming and computation in the context of media creation and manipulation. Students implement PhotoShop-style filters and digital video special effects, splice sounds, and search Web pages.

Computer science as a discipline is failing to reach a diverse audience. As a result, computational illiteracy threatens many groups of underserved students-women, minorities and possibly other, as yet undocumented groups, such as students of the humanities. If learning programming were contextualized in domains relevant to different audiences, more students would be motivated to learn to program. I contend that teaching computer science in the context of digital media manipulation will attract and engage many students who would otherwise not choose to learn programming.

In what ways do computational tools and social organization not only shape our practices, but also demand different ways of understanding the world? How does the design of the writing technologies we use affect the nature of the knowledge we produce in collaborative settings? My research examines the tools that mediate knowledge building activities in communities of collaborative authorship. Through a set of iterative studies that will be conducted over the next two years, I intend to answer questions about how the design of a new collaborative technology might transform the practices and beliefs of the people who use it.

In the traditional model of education, students are not involved in the production of knowledge. They read what others have written for them and they listen to what more knowledgeable teachers have to say. It has been observed by educational researchers that resources like textbooks often conceal from students the disciplinary practices, passion and effort that authors invest in producing texts. This is not the case with wikis. Readers of wiki texts can peruse editing histories and read the discussions that editors have had in the past. Moreover, the blurred distinction between reader and author creates an environment in which learners can actively engage in ongoing dialogue. In earlier work, I learned through interview studies that many Wikipedians explicitly treat participation in Wikipedia as an opportunity to learn about the world through writing and discourse.

The promise of education for children and young adults is much farther reaching than specific sets of skills or content knowledge. We expect students to leave the classroom with new beliefs about themselves and about their relationship to knowledge. We hope that students learn not only the ability to perform discrete tasks in subject areas, but also the propensity to apply critical skills from these domains to improve their everyday lives. The goals of education do not end with conceptual understanding; in order to positively impact students' lives, educational experiences must initiate a transformation of identity. Not only must students be able to perform new skills, and not only must they recognize the appropriate circumstances in which to do so, but they must also reconceptualize their roles in the world outside the classroom.

In an exploratory study, we used survey, interviews and content analysis techniques to understand how educators appropriate Twitter and other social media in their practice. We report on teachers' use of Twitter, structural features of their on and offline professional networks, and the institutional policies that shape their appropriation of social media for professional use. Most importantly, our analysis suggests teachers on Twitter tend to be eager adopters of technologies and well positioned to broker information as bridges between members of their local communities of practice and other networks of educators. Based on these findings, we discuss teachers on Twitter as participants in grassroots professional development efforts and the potential for them to be powerful fomenters and enactors of reform in educational communities.

Do you automatically consider US government websites to be a trustworthy source of information about science? The high school student quoted above was required to search for information about environmental issues and reflected in an interview that she would first go to government sites, because she knows that the information she finds there will be trustworthy.

Where does reliable information come from? Young people have difficulty assessing the quality of information sources they find on the Web (Kafai, 1997; Wallace et. al. 2000; Kuiper, 2005). Helping students learn to critically assess sources has sometimes been portrayed as a typical learning problem: expert practices need to be made accessible to a generation of learners.

ABSTRACT Introduction to Media Computation is a new CS1 aimed especially at non-majors that was taught in Spring 2003 with some success. The course is contextualized around the theme of manipulating and creating media. Of the 121 students who took the course (2/3 female), only three students dropped (all male), and 89% completed the course with a grade C or better.

ABSTRACT Facebook is a global phenomenon, yet little is known about use of the site in urban parts of the developing world where the social network's users are increasingly located. We qualitatively studied Facebook use among 28 young adults living in Viwandani, an informal settlement, or slum, in Nairobi, Kenya.