Our first week of Social Computing and Media

Source: interactive.usc.edu

This week Shane McLoughlin, our lecturer,  welcomed us to Social Computing and Media. We were given a break down of the module and its assessments. We have to post every week to our blog and record our learning. We will be using it as our e-portfolio.

This module requires us to do a group project. We must make a mobile app or a web mashup. This week we were given the opportunity to meet up with out groups, introduce ourselves and plan our project.
My group messaged each using Facebook and formed a group chat. We did this so that it was easy to communicate. We came to the decision to make a mobile application as it seemed to be the most appealing and fun option. We used our wiki space on blackboard to start sharing our ideas, and I must say, I am quite excited to get started!

I am happy with my group, we are all enthusiastic and friendly. We all want to jump
right in and get started with our project.
This week I was also given the task to complete two online assessments. These required me to follow two online tutorials and learn the material for an online mcq test. Both of the tutorials were quite basic and were easy to finish quickly.

Source: nick54324860.blogspot.com

In the lectures we began discussing what social computing is. Social computing is the collaborative and interactive aspect of online behaviour. It includes logs, wikis, social networking, social bookmarking etc. and is closely related to web 2.0. Social media is any form of of online publication or present that allows end users to engage in multi-directional conversations in or around the content on the website.

The first generation of the world wide web is referred to as Web 1.0. It was a time of one way communication of information that was characterised by static web sites, as opposed to changing spaces.

The second generation, Web 2.0, is a concept which can be thought of as the framework of applications supporting the processes of social computing. In 2009, Castells defined web 2.0 as: "the clusters of technologies, devices, and applications that support the proliferation of social spaces on the internet"

Web 3.0 is the third generation of the world wide web. It is a semantic web an idea originally proposed by a man named Tim Berners Lee who said that Web 3.0 is "a web of data that can be processed directly and indirectly by machines"

This is an interesting YouTube series of videos that talks about social computing:

That's all for week 1!