Online Communities and Crowds (Winter 2022)

Online Communities & Crowds

Communication Studies 378 (undergraduate)

Media, Technology & Society (MTS) 525 (graduate)

Wednesdays 10am-11:30am CT

Winter, 2022

Northwestern University

Course websites

Canvas for announcements, submitting assignments, and file sharing.

Zoom for remote, synchronous course meetings and guest speaker visits.

Class discord server for chat and probably some other stuff.

Course Wikiedu page for everything related to the Wikipedia Assignment.

This wiki page for nearly everything else.

Instructor: Aaron Shaw (aaronshaw@northwestern.edu)

Office Hours: TBA and by-appointment.

Please signup for office hours appointments (and check that page for details).

Also usually available via chat during "business hours."

Teaching Assistant: Sohyeon Hwang

Office Hours: TBA and by-appointment.

Detail of an ukiyo-e styled image generated by Wombo.ai from the prompt "online communities and crowds" on December 27, 2021

Course information

Overview

Online communities & crowds are fundamental to how people communicate, work, play, learn, socialize, and more. However, they also threaten our well-being and undermine critical social institutions as well as the integrity of public discourse.

This course seeks to understand online communities & crowds. It does so through an interdisciplinary inquiry into a set of practical challenges that confront online communities & crowds today. When and why do some efforts to overcome these challenges succeed? What insights and expectations can we draw from these experiences?

Learning objectives

The course is designed to enable students to achieve the following goals:

• Understand and critically engage central concepts, examples, and issues relevant to online communities & crowds.
• Experience and apply practical approaches to online collaboration (in online communities and crowds).
• Assess and iteratively improve upon your own work and that of your peers in light of the concerns analyzed in class.
• Elaborate original insights into online communities & crowds, extending and applying the material presented in class.

Format and materials

The course consists of both synchronous (remote or in-person) and asynchronous (recorded) lecture sessions as well as discussion sections. The undergraduate discussion sections will be led by the Teaching Assistant and the graduate discussion section will be led by the Instructor.

The lectures will synthesize a variety of historical, theoretical, and empirical content. The discussion sections will focus on weekly assignments, including readings and other materials.

All readings and other materials for the course will be linked from this page and/or posted on Canvas.

Assignments and responsibilities

The course includes "weekly" and "irregular" assignments.

Every week all participants are responsible for (1) consuming any recorded lecture(s); (2) attending the synchronous lecture and discussion section; and (3) completing any weekly assignments. Weekly assignments include readings, reading quizzes (undergraduate) or memos (graduate), as well as some other written and/or experiential learning tasks.

In general, graduate level reading assignments for the course consist of the undergraduate reading assignments plus additional materials (the schedule indicates this accordingly). Written assignments for graduate and undergraduate members of the class diverge quite a bit and details are provided below. All members of the course will complete the Wikipedia assignment.

All written assignments should be submitted as a PDF via Canvas. I recommend a clear, professional, and conversational tone in your writing. I also recommend you familiarize yourself with salient principles on academic integrity, including the appropriate attribution of sources. Please submit written work in a readable (size 11 or greater) font and adopt a standard citation style (e.g., APA or PACM HCI) throughout. Please include your name somewhere (prominent!) in the document that you submit as well as your last name at the beginning of the filename (e.g., "Shaw-occ-week1-assignment.pdf").

Weekly assignments

The course schedule provides details of all weekly assignments as well as links to materials and Canvas pages required to complete them. Specifics for other types of assignments follow below.

Undergraduate: Reading quizzes

In the first minutes of lecture on Wednesday (unless otherwise specified), all undergraduate students in the course will receive a reading quiz, consisting of a small number of multiple-choice questions, graded out of 10 points. The quiz will start when class starts and end four minutes later. If you are slightly late, you might be able to complete the quiz in time. If you are very late or absent, you’ll get a zero. There are no make-up quizzes. At the end of the term, we’ll drop your lowest two quiz grades.

Graduate: Reading memos and lead discussants

Graduate students in the course are required to submit weekly reading memos via Canvas no later than Wednesday at 6pm CT. The memos are intended to facilitate digestion of the materials ahead of each discussion section. They should be short (400-500 words) and should synthesize central arguments and/or themes of readings. During the quarter you may skip up to two reading memos. Each graduate student will also be required to serve as a lead discussant in section at least once during the quarter. Details and expectations will be provided in the first section meeting.

Irregular assignments

Irregular assignments include The Wikipedia assignment as well as several more extended written assignments. Brief descriptions follow here with additional details provided via linked pages.

The Wikipedia assignment (everyone)

All members of the course will participate in the collaborative creation of a de novo Wikipedia article. This assignment will proceed in small teams of 4-5 people led by graduate students and will take place over about six weeks. It will also culminate in a short essay reflecting on and assessing the experience in light of the other course materials.

Undergraduate

Not-quite-final exam

Undergraduate students in the course will be required to complete a not-quite-final exam late in the quarter that will cover material from lectures and from the assigned readings. The exam will consist of two short essays. The essays will respond to prompts that we provide and will cover the course material up to the point of the exam; they will emphasize synthetic understanding of course materials and will not require outside research.

Community Advising assignments 1 & 2

Undergraduate students in the course will also be required to complete two Community Advising assignments (CA1 and CA2, for short). For each assignment, you are to serve as an expert advisor to the leaders and members of an online community or crowd and to provide evidence-based insights into how to better address a specific challenge they face. For CA1, the teaching team will select both the community/crowd as well as the challenge. For CA2, you select your own community/crowd and challenge. We encourage you to choose a community/crowd of which you are a member/leader and where you could, at least in theory, deliver your recommendations to other members/leaders and have some chance of seeing them debated/adopted. Please note that we require you to meet with a member of the teaching team to discuss your plan and to secure written (email or chat is fine) approval of your chosen community/crowd and challenge at least ten days before CA2 is due.

Graduate: Original research project

Graduate students in the course will be required to complete an original research project. This project may take the form of (1) a detailed research plan/proposal; (2) a replication/revisit of an important and influential study; (3) a completed original research manuscript (i.e., a "submission-ready" draft of a journal article or conference paper).

Discussion sections

The center of this course will be your discussion section. Attendance and participation are mandatory. Detailed attendance and participation policies will be provided by the respective section leaders.

Sections are meant to provide you with an opportunity to confront, challenge, and explore the major themes of each week in a safe, respectful environment. Your active participation is indispensable, so come prepared, ready to test out ideas and hypotheses. Please keep in mind that participation is about more than who speaks the most. It is also about demonstrating a willingness to think through your own and others’ ideas. Some ground rules:

• Respect others’ rights to hold opinions and beliefs different from yours. Challenge the idea, not the person.
• Listen carefully to what others are saying even when you disagree. Comments that you make (asking for clarification, sharing critiques, expanding on a point, etc.) should reflect that you have paid attention to the speaker’s comments.
• Be courteous. Don’t interrupt or engage in private conversations while others are speaking.
• Support your statements. Use evidence and provide a rationale for your points.
• Allow everyone the chance to talk. If you have spoken a lot already, try to hold back a bit; if you are hesitant to speak, look for opportunities to contribute to the discussion.

Grading and assessment

The teaching team will assign grades (usually a number between 0-10) that assess your performance of several elements of the course listed in the table below. For each element, grades start with the maximum possible value (10) and only decrease in the event of a specific failure to meet some aspect of the relevant assessment rubric (more on those below). The percentage values are weights that will be applied to calculate your overall grade for the course.

Course element	Undergraduate	Graduate
Participation	20%	20%
Weekly assignments	15%	30%
Wikipedia assignment	15%	15%
Community Advising #1	10%	NA
Community Advising #2	20%	NA
Final exam	20%	NA
Original research project	NA	35%

For detailed assessment rubrics that the teaching team will use to derive grades for all assignments, please see the corresponding assignment page as well as Aaron's general assessment page. Other relevant information about academic integrity policies, grade appeals (requests to regrade), and more can be found on the classroom policies page.

Policies

General course policies

General policies on a wide variety of topics including classroom equity, attendance, academic integrity, accommodations, late assignments, and more are provided on Aaron's class policies page. Below are some policy statements specific to this course and quarter.

COVID-19 Policies

Aaron's COVID-19 policies page provides specific COVID-19 policies mandated by Northwestern University. Several additional COVID-19-related policies follow below.

Teaching and learning in a pandemic

Even beyond my COVID-19 policies, the ongoing pandemic will impact this course in various ways, some of them obvious and tangible and others harder to pin down. On the obvious and tangible front, we have things like the fact that we will begin quarter remotely and, assuming we return to campus, will still be wearing masks when we do so. These will shape our collective experience in major ways.

On the "harder to pin down" side, even though (or maybe especially because) we've been doing this pandemic thing for a while now, many of us may experience elevated levels of exhaustion, stress, uncertainty and/or distraction. We may need to provide unexpected support to family, friends, or others in our communities. I have some personal experiences with this and I expect that many (all?) of you do too. It can be a difficult time.

It is important to acknowledge the realities of the situation and create the space to discuss and process them in the context of our class throughout the quarter. As your instructor and colleague, I commit to do my best to approach the course in an adaptive, generous, and empathetic way. I will try to be transparent and direct with you throughout—both with respect to the course material as well as the pandemic and the university's ongoing response to it. I ask that you try to extend a similar attitude towards everyone in the course. When you have questions, feedback, or concerns, please try to share them in an appropriate, empathetic way. If you require accommodations of any kind at any time (directly related to the pandemic or not), please contact me.

Expectations for class sessions

The following are some baseline expectations for our class sessions. Please feel free to ask questions, suggest changes, or raise concerns during the quarter. I welcome all input.

• All members of the class are expected to create a supportive and welcoming environment that is respectful of the conditions under which we are participating in this class.
• All members of the class are expected to take reasonable steps to create an effective teaching/learning environment for themselves and others.

Please note that these expectations apply independent of whatever modalities we use to hold the class!

Expectations for synchronous remote "lecture" sessions

And here are suggested protocols for any video/audio portions of the "lecture" portions of our class (i.e., the Wednesday meetings):

• Please mute your microphone whenever you're not speaking and learn to use "push-to-talk" if/when possible.
• Video is optional for students during lecture, although if you're willing/able to keep the instructors company in the video channel we always appreciate it.
• If possible, we ask you to enable video when you want to speak (ask a question, make a comment, etc.) or are in breakout rooms.
• If you need to excuse yourself at any time and for any reason you may do so.
• Children, family, pets, roommates, and others with whom you may share your workspace are welcome to join our class as needed. Please do your best to minimize distractions and disruptions to others in the course.

Expectations for in-person sessions

Please wear a suitable and well-fitting face covering over your nose and mouth for the duration of our time in class together.

I ask everyone to come to our in-person class sessions prepared to comply with all applicable university COVID-19 policies and guidelines. We will be following Northwestern's guidelines for instructional spaces, including the use of face coverings, consistent seating, and health monitoring using the Symptom Tracker app (either the mobile or web-based version is fine). We'll review this early in the quarter as Northwestern continues to update its policies and guidelines.

Syllabus revisions

This syllabus will be a dynamic document that will evolve throughout the quarter. Although the core expectations are fixed, the details will shift. As a result, please keep in mind the following:

1. Assignments and readings are frozen 1 week before they are due. I will not add readings or assignments less than one week before they are due. If I forget to add something or fill in a "To Be Determined" less than one week before it's due, it is dropped. If you plan to read or work more than one week ahead, contact me first.
2. Substantial changes to the syllabus or course materials will be announced. Please monitor your email for Canvas messages about changes. Also, whenever I make changes, these changes will be recorded in the edit history of this page so that you can track what has changed.
3. The course design may adapt throughout the quarter. As usual (for me at least), I may iterate and prototype course design elements rapidly along the way. To this end, I will ask you for voluntary feedback — especially toward the beginning of the quarter. Please let me know what is working and what can be improved. In the past, I have made many adjustments based on this feedback and I expect to do so again.

Additional resources/readings

Throughout the quarter, we will undoubtedly generate a long list of related topics, readings, videos, memes, etc.

Please add things to that list here

Schedule (with all the details)

Week 1: 9.22

TOPIC

Reading/Viewing

• Benzecry, Claudio. (Forthcoming). The Perfect Fit. University of Chicago Press. Preface and Chapter 1 (on Canvas).

Additional resources

• Stevens, Mitchell. 2021. Harvard-Riverside, Round Trip. Public Books, August 11.

Acknowledgments

This course design and syllabus builds from prior iterations as well as similar/adjacent courses offered by Joseph Reagle (Northeastern University); Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington); Casey Fiesler (University of Colorado at Boulder); Amy Bruckman (Georgia Institute of Technology); Sarita Yardi Schoenbeck (University of Michigan); Nazanin Andalibi (University of Michigan); and Nicole Ellison (University of Michigan). It has also been shaped by input from past students in the course and past teaching assistants (Sneha Narayan and Jeremy Foote).