Social Computing

For most people, an ordinary day is filled with social interaction. We converse with our family, friends, we talk with our co-workers, engage in routine exchanges with familiar strangers at the bus stop and in the grocery store. Social activity is a fundamental aspect of human life. Social computing is an area of computer science that is concerned with the intersection of social behavior and computational systems. It is based on creating or recreating social conventions and social contexts through the use of software and technology.

With the rise of computers, the Internet, and digital and mobile devices many forms of communication have now become interactive. Some online interactions are obviously social – exchanging email with a family member, sharing photos with friends, instant messaging with coworkers. These interactions are prototypically social because they are about communicating with people we know. But other sorts of online activity also count as social – creating a web page, bidding for something on eBay, following someone on Twitter, making an edit to Wikipedia. These actions may not involve people we know, and may not lead to interactions, but nevertheless, they are social because we do them with other people in mind: the belief that we have an audience – even if it is composed of strangers we will never meet – shapes what we do, how we do it, and why.

The roots of social computing date back to the 1960s, with the recognition that computers could be used for communications and not just computation. But, in my view, social computing came into its own in the late 1990s and early 2000s when digital systems became capable of doing more than simply serving as platforms for sharing online content and conversation.

The Value of Social Computing

Why does social computing matter? Besides the fact that the social interaction supported by social computing systems is intrinsically rewarding, there are a number of ways in which social computing systems can provide value over that offered by purely digital systems.

• Systems may be able to produce results more efficiently.

• Can be of value is by increasing the quality of results.

• Value is by producing results that are seen as fairer or more legitimate.

• Provides value is by tapping into abilities that are uniquely human.

Greater efficiency, quality, and legitimacy are important benefits, but the reason most people engage with social computing systems lies in the give and take of the interaction itself, the meaning and insight we derive from it, and the connections with others that may be created and strengthened as its result.

Connecting People through Technology

Social computing is about systems that perform computations on information that is embedded in a social context. Social computing refers to systems that support the gathering, processing, and dissemination of information that is distributed across social collectives. At the core of this definition is the linking of information to identity. That is, information is associated with people, and, for the purposes of social computing, the association of information with identity matters. The second element of this definition is the idea that individuals are associated with one another in social collectives. Social collectives can be teams, communities, organizations, markets, cohorts, and so forth.

A third element of the definition is that social computing systems have mechanisms for managing information, identity, and their interrelationships. This follows from the mention of the gathering, use, and dissemination of information distributed across social collectives. Whereas an ordinary computational system need only manage information and its processing, social computing systems must also manage the social collective, which is to say that it must provide a way for individuals to have in-system identities, relate information to those identities, and manage relationships among the identities. Social computing systems can take a number of approaches to this, and the sort of social architecture it employs fundamentally shapes the nature of the system.

Social computing is a large area, and it is one that is growing rapidly. New examples of social computing mechanisms and systems spring up seemingly overnight. Designers and scholars from a wide range of disciplines – behavioral economics, computer science, game design, human-computer interaction, psychology, and sociology, to name a few – are actively studying social computing systems and applying insights gleaned from their disciplines.

Use Technology When Appropriate

Interactive communication can be facilitated through a variety of electronic mediums, including video-conferences and teleconferences. While this allows for a wider range of business communication channels, sometimes in-person communication is more appropriate and effective. Examples include instances when team members have not met in person for a period of time when a discussion topic is complex, there are numerous participants, or where it’s important to read non-verbal signals and cues from one another. When using interactive technology, make an effort to include everyone just as you would in a live meeting.

Photo by Derek Thomson on Unsplash

Crowdsourcing

Today I would like to share an assignment from the Interaction Design course. Back in July 2020, I started participating in this online course on Coursera. The course is actually an online specialization consisting of 8 single courses. Each of them can be enrolled separately and takes about 4-5 weeks following a determined schedule with assignments and deadlines.

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer accessible and affordable remote learning opportunities to students all over the world. I found it pretty amazing!

As a global society, getting an education has become increasingly important, but increasingly difficult beyond the high school level. Institutions of higher education present the obstacles of entrance examinations, tuition, distance, living expenses, and so much more.

The course I attended counted more than 4000 classmates from all over the world and gave me the chance to listen to a professor from the University of California, San Diego, the creator and publisher of the course. I had access to knowledge, information, and inspiration, which I probably wouldn’t have had in a non-digital world.

The assignment is from the specialization’s third course “Social Computing”.

Project overview: Pick a crowdsourcing platform and spend at least half an hour doing crowd work on it. You’ll need to sign up for the platform of your choice and complete some tasks. Along the way, you could earn some extra money or advance human knowledge. This could be a citizen science platform or a paid crowdsourcing platform. Some examples you might consider include Foldit, MechanicalTurk, Upwork, Wikipedia, Duolingo, Lab-in-the-wild. Afterward, find a discussion forum for that platform. It could be a third-party site like Turkopticon, or a built-in forum like a Wikipedia Talk page. Get a sense of the discussion themes, as you’ll be reporting on them.

My submission: Your submission for this assignment consists of two parts. The first will be a text response to the questions below. Your answers should be numbered in correspondence with the question answered. The second will be a set of 3-5 screenshots in pdf form that capture your experience using the crowdsourcing platform.

1. List the URL of the crowdsourcing platform

• https://www.duolingo.com/learn

2. Describe your experience in 3-4 sentences

• Straightforward to use Motivating

• Entertaining

3. In 2-3 sentences describe what was the hardest thing to figure out on the site.

• No-Human Interaction

• Not Enough Control Over Vocabulary Topics

• Some Sentences are Unnatural

4. On a scale of 1-10 (1 being least, 10 being most), how much did you enjoy the experience?

• 10

5. In 2-3 sentences answer the question: If you could change one aspect of the platform, what would it be?

• In the long run, making and re-making the same exercises can become a bit boring. Therefore I would try to internalize sentences with context. I would also add the possibility to speak and/or read. I'd try to live the language as much as possible.

6. List the URL of a forum post that you thought was particularly interesting.

• https://forum.duolingo.com/

7. In 2-3 sentences describe why you thought this forum post was particularly interesting.

• The forum gives new online visitors, clients, and potential customers a reason to return to Duolingo. In general, forums are ideal to provide your community with a way to connect to each other.

8. In five years, will crowdsourcing be more popular or less? Answer on a scale from 1-7: 1 significantly less popular, 4 no change, 7 significantly more popular.

• 4-5

9. In 2-3 sentences describe your reasoning for your answer to question 8.

• Crowdsourcing models are great in many aspects. But also brings many potential difficulties. One of the biggest is that it can be used to exploit desperate people by offering minimal or unfair rewards.

10. Please upload a pdf containing at least 3 screenshots of your experiences on a crowdsourcing platform.

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Duolingo recognizes that language learners need to be motivated to make sure they come back to the app and engage in some more language fun. Duolingo uses several different methods to keep you hooked.

Visual Learning

A lot of the learning that goes on in Duolingo is visual. There are pictures for learning vocabulary, colors that indicate whether you’re right or wrong,

and highlighted tappable text for new words or grammar points. If you’re a visual learner like me, you’ll love it.

A Beautiful Interface

I just love everything about the sleek interface of Duolingo. One of my favorite things is the little turtle button that allows you to listen to ‘slow’ pronunciations of the word or phrase. This creepily slow voice is a very useful feature in the exercises

that ask you to type what you hear:

Weekly leaderboards

Here is when learning becomes fun and entertaining, Leaderboard is a new experience where you can compete with other Duos in a league. Each weekly league starts every Monday at 12 am UTC. You will be paired with 30 new Duos each week. You can earn XP and rise in the ranks of your leaderboard. Then the top ten XP performers of that league will be “promoted” to a higher tier for the next week. The bottom ten XP performers will be demoted to the previous tier.

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Finally, regardless of the assignment, I would like to share few notes from the course.

Crowdsourcing vs. Crowdfunding

While crowdsourcing seeks information or work product, crowdfunding seeks money to support individuals, charities, or startup companies. People can contribute to crowdfunding requests with no expectation of repayment, or companies can offer shares of the business to contributors.

Benefits of Crowdsourcing

The advantages of crowdsourcing include cost savings, speed, and the ability to work with people who have skills that an in-house team may not have. If a task typically takes one employee a week to perform, a business can cut the turnaround time to a matter of hours by breaking the job up into many smaller parts and giving those segments to a crowd of workers. Companies that need some jobs done only on occasions, such as coding or graphic design, can crowdsource those tasks and avoid the expense of a full-time in-house employee.

Example of Crowdsourcing

Many types of jobs can be crowdsourced, including website creation and transcription. Companies that want to design new products often turn to the crowd for opinions. Rather than rely on small focus groups, companies can reach millions of consumers through social media, ensuring that the business obtains opinions from a variety of cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Photo by Jonas Denil on Unsplash