Required Reading for Next Week

For Monday, please read the chapter on Internet Surveillance and Monitoring in the Digital Security and Privacy Report.

For Wednesday, please read The Rise of Crowdsourcing.

Required Reading for Friday 23 November

For Friday 23 November, please read the Wired magazine article, The Surveillance Society.

Required Reading for Friday 9 November

Please read the following interviews (conducted by Neweurasia.net contributor Leila Tanayeva) before class on Friday:

•  Adam Kesher (Eng), who publishes a Livejournal weblog and contributes to neweurasia.net
•  Yuri Mizinov (Eng), an editor from Zonakz.net. The interview is also available in Russian.
•  Journalist and blogger Kazis Toguzbayev (Eng).
•  Ilim Karypbekov (Rus), media lawyer and director of the Institute of Media Representative, on legal issues related to blogs in Kazakhstan.

Online Participatory Journalism in Kazakhstan, part two

Today in class, we will discuss the sites students looked at for the assignment we began on Wednesday.

After that, we will continue the process of looking for signs of participatory journalism in Kazakhstan. The second part of the project will be to use the tools we have available (search engines, blogroll links, existing networks and knowledge) to come up with a list of potential examples of online participatory journalism in Kazakhstan. These may include weblogs, forums, listservs, standard websites, and so on.

Your assignment: Each student should come up with a list of potential sites to investigate (at least five) and post a link to that site by class time on Monday.

Required Reading: For next week (due for class Monday 5 November), read “Internet Governance in Kazakhstan,” pages 119 to 131 in the OSCE report, Governing the Internet. Note the link is to the entire document, but you only have to read one chapter.

Collaborative and Open Source Production

 

Collaborative Production and Open Source Production are important concepts for understanding new information technologies and their relation to social networks. For our purposes, we can understand these as closely related terms describing social arrangements through which groups of people work together in order to create something.

Collaborative Production can refer to any creative process in which several people (or more) cooperate. In a new information technology environment, the term takes on special importance because NITs reduce the limitations of collaboration. Interactive networks allow more people to work together. They can communicate instantly, and they do not necessarily require face-to-face interaction. Digitization allows for the creation of multiple copies (or multiple versions) of documents and other file types. In short, NITs can create new opportunities for expanded collaboration among more people than an “old media” environment can enable.

The term open source is often used to refer to a method for creating and improving software, but has been applied more broadly to any kind of collaborative production process that attempts to keep restrictions on participation as limited as possible.

Today we will have a quick introduction to these concepts and we will look at one of the best-known examples of online collaborative production, Wikipedia.

For this week, please:

• Explore the Wikipedia site;
• Read About Wikipedia;
• Read the Wikipedia article on Open Source;
• Read the Wikipedia article on Wikis

Required Reading for Friday 5 October

For Friday’s class, please read two short articles from Nieman Reports about online community and journalism. Be sure to visit the “related web links” in each story:

• Community Building on the Web: Implications for Journalism, by Craig Newmark
• The Challenge of Community Building, by Gary Kebbel

Nieman Reports is Harvard University’s quarterly journal about issues in journalism. In their Winter 2006 issue, Goodbye Gutenberg (from which the assigned readings come), they look at challenges and opportunities facing journalism in the new information technology era. You may wish to browse this issue, or other issues.

Required Reading for Monday 1 October

For Monday 1 October, please read Blogging as a Form of Journalism and Weblogs: a New Source of News, both of which are from Online Journalism Review and by J.D. Lasica.

Required reading for this week

For this week, please read Jonathan Dube’s article, RSS for Journalists and look at his Bloglines links for journalists. Also read the Wikipedia entry on web feeds.

Required Reading: We Media

 

Beginning this week we will be reading “We Media: How Audiences are Shaping the Future of News and Information,” by Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis. The report has several chapters. (The link leads you to a page where you can either select individual chapters in HTML, or download the entire report in PDF format.) Please read the report according to this schedule:

• By Monday 3 Sep: Introduction, Foreword, and Chapters 1 – 3
• By Monday 10 Sep: Chapters 4 and 5
• By Monday 17 Sep: Chapters 6 and 7 and the appendix

While you are reading, pay attention to major concepts and arguments, and to how examples are used to support those arguments.

Required Reading for Monday 27 August

For this Monday, please read the WordPress “Introduction to Blogging” and browse through the WordPress online documentation.