User talk:Tonygrimaud

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Revision as of 18:28, 10 November 2010 by Tonygrimaud (talk | contribs) (adding thoughts)
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well...here we go!

For these past few weeks, I have been fascinated by how communities of practice work, the idea of on-line cooperation and user-generated content, and how this phenomena of mass collaboration and participatory culture can produce such a wealth of valid material/information.

A good example of this on-line cooperation is perhaps Wikipedia - the online encyclopaedia, where its strength relies solely on its dedicated community of practice for its content and success.

If we can somehow understand how Wikipedia's community of practice work, and discover what motivates it to go on, perhaps we can then apply the findings to assist building and nurturing M3P's own community of practice.

The main aim of M3P is to record/save Malta's music memories, and to do that, there is a need for a strong on-line collaboration. Wikipedia is therefore looked upon as a model for the success of M3P, or better, the successful preservation of Maltese music memories. For starters, M3P runs on the same MediaWiki software as Wikipedia....


Here are some stuff I have been reading:


Shirky, C. (2009) Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. London, Penguin Books.

The author looks at the internet and explains how it is revolutionising the way we think, organise and communicate in our day-to-day lives and compares this social media revolution to the invention of the printing press, the telephone, the radio and television. He describes the additional challenges faced by many old-school managed organisations such as businesses, governments and religious institutions and warns of “a period of chaos as we re-shift to this new reality.”

Vickery, G. & Wunsch-Vincent, S. (2007) Participative web and user-created content: web 2.0, wikis and social networking. Paris, OECD Publications.

This study looks at the concept of the ‘participating web’ and describes the rapid growth of User-Created Content (UCC) and its increasing role in worldwide communication. This growth in user participation has been achieved and influenced by intelligent web services that empower its users to further collaborate and contribute to its development. While the Internet is becoming increasingly embedded in everyday life with a growing number of people becoming a part of this wider ‘participating web’ by creating and distributing, the authors argue that there is no definite agreement on what constitutes UCC, and measuring the social, cultural and economic impacts of UCC is still in its infancy.

Rheingold, H. (2002) Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution. Cambridge MA, Basic Books.

In this book Rheingold talks about wireless communication devices and how they are shaping modern culture. He interviews people around the world who work and play with their mobile phones, pagers and PDAs to observe how this social revolution is taking shape. This study shows the possibilities and dangers of communications innovation by describing how mobile devices are being used in a variety of ways and in diverse circumstances.
Chapter two of the book, ‘Technologies of Cooperation’, relates particularly to how people use their mobile devices to interact and cooperate in a virtual social scene. This is of particular interest to my area of research.


Other books on my immediate reading list:

Barabasi, A. L. (2003) Linked: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Business, Science and Everyday Life. New York, Plume.

Castells, M. (ed.) (2004) The Network Society: A Cross Cultural Perspective. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Ebersbach, A. Glaser, M. & Heigl, R. (2006) Wiki: Web Collaboration. Translated from the German “WikiTools” by A. Adelung. Berlin, Springer.

Godin, S. (2008) Tribes: We need you to lead us. London, Piatkus Books.

Keen, A. (2007) The Cult of the Amateur: How’s Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture and Assaulting Our Economy. London, Nicholas Brealey.

Wenger, E. (2008) Communities of practice: learning, meanings, and identity. New York, Cambridge University Press

The Evolution of Co-operation - Robert Axelrod (1990) New York, Penguin Books.