So far this course, Collaborating in Online Communities, has been very interesting. We have spent time in class to discuss our own opinions of what an online community is and where you can find them. We have also spent time in class to discuss three different reading assignments that we had for homework. The first reading assignment was
What is Collaboration Anyway? by Adam Hyde et. al.. This reading was mainly about different aspects of collaboration, and talked about the pros and cons it has in online communities. It used Wikipedia as an example of a place where people can collaborate to make everyone more knowledgable and as a place to make people less knowledgable. Stephen Colbert showed how Wikipedia can have its fault if enough people want to post something that is not true. The next reading was
Collective Intelligence by Pierre Levy. This reading discussed how important collective intelligence can be. It describes collective intelligence as universally distributed intelligence and a community where everyone acknowledges each others opinions and information that they provide. The last reading was an article titled,
Social Network Nextdoor Moves To Block Racial Profiling Online by Aarti Shahani. This article is about the online program Nextdoor that allows its users to post messages about their community anywhere from events to crimes that they witnessed. The articled talked about how the online program is working towards having less racial profiling on their site. They did this by forcing people to give at least two descriptive traits about someone when talking about them. These traits have to be related to things that they were wearing or doing.
