CSCW and Web 2.0:are We in?

A. Agostini, G. De Michelis, M. LoregianDISCo, University of Milano-Bicocca

www.itis.disco.unimib.it

Workshop "Academia 2.0 and beyond" // COOP ’08 // May 19 2008

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

Outline

• Following the outline suggested for the workshop:

1. Our experience with Web 2.0 usage in an academic field

2. Issues: How should academia deal with Web 2.0?

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

ExperienceExperience

Not in the paper

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

The SITI curriculum

• Our reference lab: “Innovative Technologies for Interaction and Services” (ITIS)

• We teach in a curriculum called “Innovative Systems and Interaction Technologies” (SITI, in Italian)• We organized introductory seminars on various topics, including

Web 2.0, with invited talks with speakers from industry (e.g., H3G)

• Our courses, in the last two years:• CSCW, Interaction Design, Context-aware Systems• we asked our students to be proactive, to look for and to post

relevant material on a bloghttp://www.siti.disco.unimib.it/blog (in Italian)

• participation part of the final grade

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

The SITI blog

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

The blog

• Sometimes used also for teaching announcements (to keep students tuned)

• Quite a wide audience (not only students)

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

Contributions

• 17 contributing students(from 3 courses so far, and 2 master theses)

• 118 posts(max. 27, avg. 7)

• 183 comments on those posts(max. 7, discussion followed in classroom)

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

IssuesIssues

In the paper

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

The gap

• Some of the authors contributed in the creation of CSCW as a research area

• Reflection driving discussions before innovation (or at the same time)

• Web 2.0 has developed “spontaneously”, with no grounding on (academic) research

• Academia seems to be just studying what Web 2.0 is like and what is happening, not how Web 2.0 could evolve and be improved

This is what we teach:

to design by making

choices consciously

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

Topics

• Some questions from our position paper:• Where is the technology we use going? • Can we accept the Web synecdoche (i.e., that the Web takes the

place of the whole work-station)? • Why did the research on email, as a technology, go out of fashion? Is

really email a prefect medium, or can it still be improved?• Can we be satisfied with the ethnographic observation of social

networking systems, or should we also discuss them from the viewpoints of the quality of the social relations they support, of the technological trajectories they follow, of their quality as systems?

• This is what we did in the ‘80s and ‘90s, wasn’t it the proper way of doing research?

We would like to start (again) a discussion in the CSCW community

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

Where, When, and How to discuss

• Here, at the workshop

• During this conference (and others)

• Feel free to write us if you share our concerns

••• ITIS Lab ••• http://www.itis.disco.unimib.it •••

ThanksThanksMarco Loregian

www.siti.disco.unimib.it/research/people/marco-loregian

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