Social media research seminar offered again this Fall

I’m really excited to teach the graduate social media research seminar again this Fall – TECH 637: Research Focus: The Social Internet.

In Fall 2013, the course will be offered Monday evening from 6-8:50 pm.

Each week, we read and discuss research about core social media topics such as: Internet culture (lolcats!), online communities, crowd sourcing, online identity, attention and distraction, etc. Students’ grades are based on social media immersion (tweeting, blogging, experimenting and reviewing services), article analyses, and an original research paper on a topic of their choice. Last year’s syllabus is embedded at the bottom of this post.

The course is open to all students at Purdue and usually enrolls an interesting and diverse group of people. No technical expertise required.

This is what students who took this course in the past had to say about it (taken from anonymous course evaluations):

The informal operation of the class helps to support an environment of participation and collaboration. I felt like classmates were really my teammates in the learning process.

✽

Prior to enrolling in TECH 621, The Social Internet, I had not received formal education on how to effectively design and carry out a research project at the graduate level. Dr. Vorvoreanu’s course structure not only introduced me to these important aspects of graduate education, but also enabled me to develop my first-ever research paper on society’s use of emerging, Web-based communication technologies. I now look forward to submitting my paper to an upcoming high-tech conference.

✽
Because of this course, I feel ready to undertake new research endeavors in both my academic and professional career. It is my hope that Dr. Vorvoreanu continues to offer her students practical, hands-on research experience.

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I really do like the implementation of Twitter into classroom assignments and learning. It was not only epicly awesome, but social media as a whole is something that is going to play a big part in the future of companies development. Though me, as well as other classmates, were not a fan of Twitter to begin with, Dr. V’s assertion of using the media outlet lets one respect how powerful, and helpful it is for not only classroom purposes, but business potential as well.

✽

Finally, I enjoyed how this technology class can be adapted to fit the needs of any student from any department on campus! I hope that you continue to allow the final project and class presentation topics to be selected by the students.

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She talks about a fountain of learning and encourages open discussion. I feel like I learn a lot more out of it when the thoughts of myself and others are free flowing. Her readings she assigns are also current to the medium we are studying, nothing it outdated.

✽

Dr. V is a wonderful instructor and always willing to help students in any way possible. She was able to find a good balance of knowledge about social media that wasn’t too challenging for the beginner students, yet introduced new topics to students with quite a bit of experience in social media.
Also, I really liked the lessons about how to effectively read a journal article in a short amount of time. This is something I haven’t been taught in my previous two years of grad school.

If you took this course and would like to comment below, please help others decide whether this course is for them. You can do so by sharing your opinion of the course and/or answering questions such as:

• what kinds of students should take this course? what majors?
• looking back, do you think this course helped you? why? why not? how so?
• what advice do you have for students who want to succeed in this course?

If you are a graduate student interested in this course and have any questions, please feel free to contact me.

Looking forward to seeing you in class,

Dr. V

View this document on Scribd

LOLspeak study

[cross-posted from PR Connections]

I have been arguing for a while that LOLcats belong in graduate courses and they are worthy of scholarly research.

So, here is a presentation about the linguistic study of LOLspeak (the language cats speak). It is analyzed as language play that has a function in the construction of online identity – as a cat and Internet savvy person.

TECH 621 Fall 2011 – Presentation Structure

Remember that we will meet back in Knoy for the last class session: Your final project presentation.

Please keep your presentation short – no more than 5-7 minutes, and follow this structure:

1. Research Question – explain the purpose of the research
2. Methods – explain how you collected and analyzed data
3. Findings – describe your sample and your most important findings
4. So, what? – explain what your findings mean, why they are important and to whom and their implications

The presentation is not graded – but if you do not present or don’t give it due attention, your APP points will suffer.

The main goal is to inform each other about our projects – it will be interesting to see what people did and what they found.

I will bring some snacks. If you’d like to, you’re welcome to bring something, too – but you don’t have to.

Dark side and Wild Card classes

Remember that this Thursday you’re presenting on a topic related to the dark side of the social internet.

Let’s tentatively plan to present remotely (but don’t get out of town yet).

Please use comments to this post to propose & discuss ideas for the Wild Card class on Dec. 1. It is your class, I am open to all ideas.

Week’s best: Oct 31-Nov 4, 2011

The post I really enjoyed last week was Xin’s visual reading reflection. Check it out!

CFP: International Workshop on User Modeling from Social Media

Thought this may be interesting to both my social media and user interface students. Even if you are not submitting, read the call for participation just to become informed about trends and research ideas.

Call for Participation: 1st International Workshop on User Modeling from Social Media
In conjunction with IUI 2012, Lisbon – Portugal

Massive amounts of data are being generated on social media sites, such as Twitter and Facebook. People from all
walks of life share data about social events, express opinions, discuss their interests, publicize businesses,
recommend products, and, explicitly or implicitly, reveal personal information.

This workshop will focus on the use of social media data for creating models of individual users from the content that
they publish. Deeper understanding of user behavior and associated attributes can benefit a wide range of intelligent
applications, such as social recommender systems and expert finders, as well as provide the foundation in support
of novel user interfaces (e.g., actively engaging the crowd in mixed-initiative question-answering systems). These
applications and interfaces may offer significant benefits to users across a wide variety of domains, such as retail,
government, healthcare and education. User modeling from public social media data may also reveal information that users would prefer to keep private. Such concerns are particularly important because individuals do not have complete control over the information they share about themselves. For example, friends of a user may inadvertently divulge private information about that user in their own posts. In this workshop we will also discuss possible mechanisms that
users might employ to monitor what information has been revealed about themselves on social media and obfuscate
any sensitive information that has been accidentally revealed.

In this workshop, we will discuss related topics:

• What aspects of an individual can be modeled from their public social media postings?
• What aspects cannot be modeled?
• What aspects should not be modeled?
• How accurate are the models that can be extracted?
• What are the best techniques for creating models?
• How might the creation of such models be thwarted?
(e.g. to preserve privacy while still allowing participation on a social network)

We hope to bring together researchers and practitioners from diverse areas, such as user modeling, intelligent user
interaction, social media analysis, natural language processing, data mining, machine learning, privacy and
security, to discuss these issues and share results.

TOPICS OF INTERESTS

Topics of interest may include but not limited to:

• Domain-specific user modeling using public social
media, including twitter, facebook, myspace, social
Q&A sites, and Amazon.com reviews for
- Retail
- Government
- Healthcare
- Education
- Sports
- News

• Domain-independent user modeling using public
social media, such as twitter, facebook, myspace, and
foursquare, to derive a wide variety of user traits
including:
- Locations
- Personality
- Demographics
- Age
- Gender

• Enterprise-focused user modeling using social media
data on public social networks and communications
(e.g., emails and blogs) within an enterprise:
- Employees’ social and collaboration patterns in a
workplace
- Work-related personality traits such as innovativeness, versatility, adaptiveness,
leadership quality, and level of expertise.

• Task-specific user modeling for
- Information recommendation
- Crowd-sourcing
- Expert finding
- Social Q&A

We plan to propose a special issue of ACM Transactions on
Interactive Information Systems (TIIS) on this topic after
the workshop.

PAPER SUBMISSION

We invite submissions in two categories:

• Position papers (2 pages)
• Short papers (4 pages)

All submission should be prepared according to the
standard SIGCHI publications format (available in
http://www.sigchi.org/chipubform) and submitted to jumahmud@us.ibm.com

WORKSHOP FORMAT

We will hold a full-day workshop program on the first day
of IUI 2012. The program begins with a madness session
during which participants introduce themselves and their
work in 5 minutes. Participants will be encouraged to make
slides for the madness session, but this will not be required.
Each paper session will conclude with a discussion led by a
pre-chosen workshop participant. These discussions will tie
together common themes of the presentations and hopefully
lead to insightful discussions about further research
directions. The program will end with a panel discussion
where panelists will discuss the current state of the art,
focus areas, and opportunities for future research.

IMPORTANT DATES

• Paper Submissions – January 6, 2012
• Author Notification – January 20, 2012
• Camera-Ready version – January 27, 2012
• Workshop – February 14, 2012

CONTACT & WEBSITE

jumahmud@us.ibm.com

https://sites.google.com/site/umsocial2012/

ORGANIZATION

Jalal Mahmud, IBM Research – Almaden
Jeffrey Nichols, IBM Research – Almaden
Michelle Zhou, IBM Research – Almaden

Week’s best: Oct. 17-28, 2011

I took a  quick look at the past two weeks in class blog posts, and here’s what stood out to me:

• Self-organizing the self – neat video found by Geovon
• Everything is miscellaneous… except towels – loved the application of concepts to everyday life, and the combination of conceptual thinking with a warm, personal tone.(GenXRecon)
• Alex’s reading notes for Everything is Miscellaneous are enthusiastic! So maybe he doesn’t hate (all) reading, after all
• And a neat idea from GenXRecon – demonstrating how, if you make ideas yours by applying them to your own interests, you may come up with interesting new research topics.

What’s been your week’s best? Consider writing such posts now and again – they are a great way of showing what you’ve read (and commented on)!