Course Overview
My Invitation to You
Welcome! 👋🏽 In this class, you’ll learn to wear two hats that mirrors research in the field of social computing: a Studier👩🏽🔬 and a Builder👷. Social computing is a scholarly subfield of human–computer interaction (HCI) that is focused on supporting and evaluating large-scale social interactions between people, mediated through computational systems.
Our focus will be to learn how to understand and critically analyze existing social computing systems followed by envisioning and building entirely new ones. How can we use technology to imagine and build a better social future? How can we encourage prosocial behavior and discourage antisocial behavior in the social technologies that we build? How do we know whether a system will be effective or even adopted in the first place?
Maybe you’re already excited about this course. Perhaps you’re intimidated. Maybe you already consider yourself familiar with some of these concepts, or maybe this is your first foray into the social side of computing. No matter what, this class will challenge you. It’ll ask you to think differently—and work differently. You’ll be expected to draw sometimes, and at other times to critically dissect ideas. Sometimes you’ll work alone, and sometimes in a group. I believe that everyone is already a social computing researcher. This could be figuring out how TikTok’s algorithm works or understanding why Slack doesn’t show read receipts, or maybe it’s building your own mobile app or website. In this class, I hope to further hone those skills so that you have the tools to become a better social computing researcher.
Please come with an open mind — as open as you can manage—and a taste for adventure. Be respectful of your classmates (and teammates, especially), particularly when disagreements arise (they will). Again, if the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that we are all in this together, and that life goes best when we help each other and practice flexibility when unexpected situations come up. Taking a class is like buying a gym membership: you won’t get results if you don’t go. But just as you don’t have to go to the gym alone all the time, remember that you’ve got a whole class full of mates who are along for the ride with you. Let’s begin.
Course Description
This course will introduce you to the field of social computing, taking a systems-oriented perspective to examine and imagine new social computing systems to address societal issues. We will read literature on different subareas of social computing to learn why some posts go viral and others don't, how sociotechnical algorithms are perceived to work and how they actually work, why some platforms fail while others succeed, and how platforms enable both incredibly prosocial and occasionally terrifying behavior. Through a semester-long group project, we will also learn to use different web programming languages and application programming interfaces (APIs) to augment existing social computing systems or build entirely new ones.
Learning Goals
As a result of your experience in this course, you will be able to:
| Computer Science → | Social Computing | ← Social Science |
|---|---|---|
| Understand the various components of a ‘full-stack’ web application and how the pieces fit together. | Recognize and predict the relationship between human social behavior and technology. | Describe social science theories relevant to social computing systems. |
| Build proficiency with commonly-used tools and technologies related to web development. | Leverage AI tools to augment social interaction and collaboration. | Analyze the real-world tensions involved in the creation of social technology. |
| Learning some fundamental UX/UI design principles in the context of web development. | Evaluate social implications of different design choices in social computing systems. | Identify potential avenues for impacting social change by leveraging your role as a worker. |
In addition, as your teacher I will help you to:
- Self-reflect on your work and receive feedback gracefully
- Recognize the power and limitations of technology to affect change (both positive and negative) in society
- Explore possible career interests in HCI, UX, and beyond
- Develop your skills of good thinking and related habits of mind such as love of learning, intellectual courage, intellectual humility, and justice.
Our Learning Community
My Approach to Teaching and Learning
I love being a teacher, I love the subject I get to teach, and I love bringing new voices into the fold. My goal is not to “cover course content,” but to welcome you into a community of learning that will serve you well for life. This goal guides my teaching philosophy and my choices as an instructor.
For example, the vast majority of our time together will be in activities and conversations. You will be talking, making, doing, teaching… This is what we call active learning, and it will help you develop your skills in collaboration, solidify your learning for the long term, spark creative thinking, and get you to have fun along the way. Long story short, you will not be sitting in class listening to me read PowerPoint slides (I may give short lectures to share basic information).
I realize active learning can be challenging, particularly for people who are introverted or have any kind of anxiety. I am here to help. I do my best to create a comfortable learning environment where everyone feels secure and able to participate and learn to their best ability. I hope, over time, you will feel at home in the learning community that we will build this semester.
How to be Part of Our Learning Community
To be a part of and benefit from this class, strive to do the following:
- Attend each class session, arriving a few minutes early so we can start on time.
- Read the assigned readings and give yourself time to mull them over, so you can participate meaningfully in our activities. We’ll occasionally have pop quizzes to help you reflect on what you read.
- Be present so that we can all make the most of the time spent in class. For our learning community to work well, we need everyone to contribute. You may be more or less interested in some classes than other students, or vice versa. That’s okay! But hopefully over the course of the semester, everyone will have contributed meaningfully to our shared learning.
- Do your best to get to know your classmates as the course goes on. These are your allies — and perhaps even future colleagues in life. The world is small. If you're on the shy side, challenge yourself to step just outside of your comfort zone when you're able.
- Don’t hesitate to ask questions — about the subject or about the assignments. I’m here to answer them, and hopefully they can help everyone learn something new. You can ask questions in preferably in class or on Edstem. You can also email me.
Contacting Me and Office Hours
Student–instructor interaction is an important part of any course. I am available to you, and I want to help you succeed in this course, both during your time at Swarthmore and in life. Please come to me with any questions, problems, discoveries, or anything else you’d like to share. If you have a question that may be of interest to others in the class (e.g., recent events, syllabus, readings, logistics, etc.), please ask it during class so that others can benefit. With personal or urgent questions, email me directly or speak to me before or after class. I am available to meet with you during my office hours and by appointment, and feel free to email me at any time.
I check email twice a day, and I don’t do it after 5pm or on weekends. In our always-on society, it’s important to set boundaries — firstly because healthy lives require off-time, and also because our academic activities require uninterrupted periods of time for reading, writing, and thinking. Moreover, taking time for rest and pursuing leisure activities have been shown to improve productivity, creativity, and accomplishment, as Alex Soojung-Kim Pang discusses in his book, Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less (video). I hope you will join me in living with more balance.
Acknowledgements
This course — like many social computing courses and systems themselves — is an exercise in remixing. I consulted and borrowed from other people’s syllabi to make this syllabus. I even co-authored a paper analyzing social computing syllabi to understand commonalities and areas for growth. This course has also been heavily influenced by conversations I’ve had over the last few months with Catherine Grevet Delcourt, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Tim Gorichanaz, and Kevin Feng. Thanks to each and every one of you.
Related courses include: Michael Bernstein’s Social Computing course at Stanford University; Catherine Grevet Delcourt’s Social Computing course at Wellesley College; Eshwar Chandrasekharan’s Social Computing course at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Amy Zhang’s Social and Collaborative Computing course at the University of Washington; Eric Gilbert's and Munmun De Choudhury's Social Computing courses at Georgia Tech; Steven Dow's Social Computing course at the University of California, San Diego; Andrés Monroy-Hernández’s Social Computing seminar at Princeton University; Juho Kim’s Introduction to Social Computing course at KAIST; and Tim Gorichanaz’s Human-Centered Design Process & Methods course at Drexel University.
