KMi Seminars
Wikis of Locality
This event took place on Wednesday 16 August 2006 at 11:30

 
Mark Gaved

In this seminar we describe an emerging form of wikis - wikis of locality – that support physical rather than virtual communities. We draw on our experience as administrators of the Open Guide to Milton Keynes, one of the Open Guides family of community developed local information guides built using wiki software, and present observations of the potential value and unique characteristics of wikis of locality from a practitioner’s perspective. Preliminary findings from a current survey of other Open Guide administrators are presented to highlight types of usage, issues and potential areas for future research.

 
KMi Seminars Event | SSSW 2013, The 10th Summer School on Ontology Engineering and the Semantic Web Journal | 25 years of knowledge acquisition
 

Social Software is...


Social Software
Social Software can be thought of as "software which extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour - message boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking."

Interacting with other people not only forms the core of human social and psychological experience, but also lies at the centre of what makes the internet such a rich, powerful and exciting collection of knowledge media. We are especially interested in what happens when such interactions take place on a very large scale -- not only because we work regularly with tens of thousands of distance learners at the Open University, but also because it is evident that being part of a crowd in real life possesses a certain 'buzz' of its own, and poses a natural challenge. Different nuances emerge in different user contexts, so we choose to investigate the contexts of work, learning and play to better understand the trade-offs involved in designing effective large-scale social software for multiple purposes.