Thenewnewmedia

For this project, we chose to work on producing a booklet of our experiences in the MOT program. Because one focus of the class is on collaboration and user content, and because consumer use of Web 2.0 social media tools is higher than ever, we decided to try to extend collaboration beyond just our group, to the entire class. We thought it would be not only apropos to the course material, but also relatively easy to get submissions from our classmates.

We setup an email address and used several tools (http://twitter.com, http://hashtags.org, email, http://flickr.com and a wiki, http://fogbugz.com) to give students easy ways to submit impromptu photos of their everyday experience in the MOT program. What we discovered is that just because you setup a medium for group communication and give people access to it, that doesn't mean that users will contribute. Apparently, everyone is not sitting around waiting for an opportunity to chip in on any project or forum that comes along. They choose which networks to participate in based on other factors, such as who else is there, what the purpose or goal is, and what are people talking about.

So far, it looks like collaborative tools have great promise for personal and workplace use, but one must still find ways to motivate users to participate in the intended way.

note: this blog's software auto-linked my urls wrong, take the commas and ) off the ends for them to work :P