The web is more a social creation than a technical one. I designed it for a social effect—to help people work together—and not as a technical toy. The ultimate goal of the Web is to support and improve our weblike existence in the world. We clump into families, associations, and companies. We develop trust across the miles and distrust around the corner.
—Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving The Web
We’ll review design issues pertaining to Web 2.0 and ’social media’ (or ’social computing’, or sometimes called the ‘read-write web’) … you’ll be using technologies, but this is contingent to the main concern and focus of this module: design … which will always be design for a purpose; and, whatever the specific purpose of a web site, generically a high priority concern will be “designing the user experience”. In addition to and in expansion of this, we’ll be looking at design of interface, design of content, and design of functionality.
Summary of contentThis will be your first pathway-specific module for multimedia. Consequently the focus will be very much more on the understanding of (design) concepts than on implementation. Concepts and topics we shall cover in this module are drawn from the following. Due to the sheer breadth of the subject matter and the time constraint of having to pack as much as possible into a single module, there won’t be the time to cover everything in depth in the classes; the onus therefore falls on you to explore issues in your self-guided study time and, as you deem appropriate, to record and report your personal discoveries in your module blog.
- Understanding the paradigm shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0: the ‘read-write’ web, web-as-platform, web applications, web services, user-generated content and the ’social web’ (blogs, wikis, other participatory sites), identity management (claimID, OpenID, FOAF, etc), anti-spam tools (captchas, etc)
- Anatomy of a Web 2.0 site: application areas (social networking, e-learning, e-retail, e-publishing, etc) and case studies (e.g. MySpace, YouTube, Lulu, Vox, EduSpaces, CollectionX)
- The Web 2.0 application design and implementation life cycle: managing a Web 2.0 project; creating / using infrastructures and metadata; reusability, interoperability, sustainability, evaluation; managing security, anti-spamming techniques (such as ‘captchas’), etc. Search engine optimisation.
- Designing the user experience, including core theoretical issues (semiotics of information, information architectures, ‘human computation‘, knowledge modelling / management, metadata, ontologies, tagging, faceted taxonomies, …)
- The fundamental tools: XHTML, PHP, CSS, MySQL, Javascript, XML
- Frameworks, toolkits, and libraries: AJAX, Symfony, AFLAX, YUI/YUI-Ext, Prototype, JQuery, MooTools, Widgetbox, MochiKit, etc
- Business, legal, economic, social and ethical issues: the Web 2.0 information economy, internet business models, intellectual property, digital rights management, licensing models (proprietary, Creative Commons, GNU GPL, etc)
- What will Web 3.0 look like? overview of the semantic web, the 3D web, and novel web services
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