Leslie Carr – Web Science MOOC http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci Web Science MOOC Mon, 19 Feb 2018 19:45:23 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.14 Tutor Interview Series: Susan Halford and Les Carr – What Next? http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci/2013/10/26/tutor-interview-les-carr-next/ Sat, 26 Oct 2013 08:24:47 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci/?p=275 Briefly tell me what your session is going to be about. Week 6 will take a brief look back over the MOOC and consider ‘what next’? It will be clear by now that the Web is evolving, and it will not remain as it is today. In this week we will consider where the Web might be in another 25 …

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Briefly tell me what your session is going to be about.
Week 6 will take a brief look back over the MOOC and consider ‘what next’? It will be clear by now that the Web is evolving, and it will not remain as it is today. In this week we will consider where the Web might be in another 25 years, looking at emergent trends such as the internet of things, linked data and the semantic web.

What are the main aims you want to achieve?
This session will encourage you to think about where the web is going, and why this matters. The Web is not finished and nor is its current form guaranteed. We all have a stake in the Web and it is our responsiblity to be informed about its future. This week we aim to get students thinking about this.

How will the learners benefit?
Learners will benefit from the expertise and insight of some of the world’s leading Web Scientists. The emphasis of the week will be on current trends and future scenarios: where might the Web go and how can we engage with this?

What excites you most about delivering this session within the Web Science MOOC?
This session draws attention to the ‘politics’ of the Web and challenges everyone to become involved in the future of the Web. It is exciting to have 10000 people thinking about how the web is evolving, what the opportunities and costs of a future web might be, in terms of privacy, globalisation, equality, and so on.

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Tutor Interview Series: Susan Halford and Les Carr – Introduction to Web Science http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci/2013/10/15/tutor-interview-series-susan-halford-introduction-web-science/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci/2013/10/15/tutor-interview-series-susan-halford-introduction-web-science/#comments Tue, 15 Oct 2013 16:16:25 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci/?p=273 Briefly tell me what your session is going to be about – Week 1 introduces Web Science – the study of the World Wide Web. The session will trace the origins and evolution of the Web, exploring the social, economic, political, cultural and – last but not least – technical processes that together come to shape the largest human information …

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les_susan

Briefly tell me what your session is going to be about –
Week 1 introduces Web Science – the study of the World Wide Web. The session will trace the origins and evolution of the Web, exploring the social, economic, political, cultural and – last but not least – technical processes that together come to shape the largest human information system in history. The session will include thought provoking introductory and concluding discussions, framing longer lectures and independent student activities.

What are the main aims you want to achieve? –
This session will introduce you to some of the key contributors to the Web Science MOOC and explain our approach to studying the World Wide Web. By the end of this first week, you will have a good understanding of Web Science, which will provide a strong foundation for the weeks that follow

How will the learners benefit? –
Learners will benefit from the expertise and insight of some of the world’s leading Web Scientists whilst the activities will enable learners to begin to do Web Science, constructing a time line of the Web and reflecting on their own web practices.

What excites you most about delivering this session within the Web Science MOOC? –
What exites me about this is that we have the opportunity to show Southampton Web Science to the world! This is a new area of study that we have been developing over the past few years and we are convinced that it should be taken up and studied – whether in a MOOC, an undergraduate degree or as postgraduate study. The Web shapes the lives of billions of people and, in turn, people, governments and corporations across the world are changing the Web as they adapt and use it. Its critical that we find ways to understand this and that’s what Web Science offers.

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Web Science: A Reading List http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci/2013/10/12/web-science-reading-list/ Sat, 12 Oct 2013 08:44:36 +0000 http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci/?p=78 Web Science is a new subject, and although we have debated the opportunity for being first to write a textbook with an introductory, interdisciplinary perspective, neither we nor any of the other Web Science researchers across the world have so far taken the plunge. There is the fabulously comprehensive (and reassuringly expensive) Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies but it’s hardly …

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Web Science is a new subject, and although we have debated the opportunity for being first to write a textbook with an introductory, interdisciplinary perspective, neither we nor any of the other Web Science researchers across the world have so far taken the plunge.

There is the fabulously comprehensive (and reassuringly expensive) Oxford Handbook of Internet Studies but it’s hardly an introductory text. It does have an opening chapter on Web Science, contributed by our own Wendy Hall, but I wouldn’t recommend the complete tome as an introduction for this course. I have had a look at the other books that we recommend for other courses, and none of them is really suitable for this MOOC as they are too focused and go too deep too quickly.

books

So, I have pulled out and snapped some of the “popular science” titles that address some of the unexpected social and technical phenomena surrounding the Web and the Internet. We use these for our MSc and PhD students, to help them think around the Web and its capabilities. Let me know if you think any of them look interesting or useful.

For a more comprehensive list you can see our complete MSc course library here: http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/lac/dtclibrary/

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First thoughts on web science http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci/2013/09/26/first-thoughts-on-web-science/ http://moocs.southampton.ac.uk/websci/2013/09/26/first-thoughts-on-web-science/#comments Thu, 26 Sep 2013 05:19:01 +0000 http://blog.soton.ac.uk/moocs/?p=36 The Web is an amazing piece of technology that has changed the way that we exchange information, buy groceries, chat to friends, keep up to date with news and watch films. As my colleague Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt says “It’s changed the way we make love and war – and it ain’t finished yet”. So it’s no surprise that scientists …

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Prof Leslie Carr
Prof Leslie Carr

The Web is an amazing piece of technology that has changed the way that we exchange information, buy groceries, chat to friends, keep up to date with news and watch films. As my colleague Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt says “It’s changed the way we make love and war – and it ain’t finished yet”. So it’s no surprise that scientists want to study it and its impact on society, to see if we can understand it better, to see if we can learn to avoid the problems that it opens up (e.g. copyright, privacy and cybercrime) and take better advantage of the opportunities that it gives us for a digital economy and a cyber-society.

But the Web we enjoy, problematic and promising, is just the latest attempt at a globally connected information system that scientists have been trying to create for over a hundred years. There have been no computers for most of that time, so inventors have tried to adapt whatever technology they had to hand. In the 1850s, the original Reuters company exchanged messages between the Paris and London stock exchanges using a fleet of 200 carrier pigeons, before successfully adopting the newfangled telegraph. In the 1920s, a Belgian scientist invented a search engine that allowed people to query a huge index of information from library books – by using the newly invented telephone.

In the courses I teach I explore more of these attempts to design a world-wide web of knowledge – the mystery for Web Science is why did this attempt work so well? Our Web was designed in an underground nuclear research bunker by a group of physicists who just wanted to share information among themselves; how come it succeeded as a global venture where the previous attempts influenced by the military or Hollywood or TV broadcasters or media publishers didn’t.

In my research about information-sharing, I try to understand how to make the technology better by building new capabilities into the Web. But just because you release a new piece of software with exciting new features, it doesn’t guarantee that it will actually be used or that it will improve peoples’ lives. So I also try to understand how to make the Web work better for people, so that social networks don’t destroy people’s privacy, e-commerce doesn’t destroy the highstreet and information sharing doesn’t destroy the media industries.

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