• Be able to explain the key concepts of the theoretical fields covered by the curriculum of the courses "Information in Context" and "Computer-mediated communication and collaboration" and relate such concepts and theories to empirical information
• Be able to outline the basic principles of organizing information
• Be able to identify users' information needs, discuss its implications for organization of information and suggest an information architecture design
• Be able to discuss social aspects of information and the role that computer-media play for culture, communication and collaboration
• Apply the discussion in the analysis of various forms of computer-mediated communication and computer supported collaboration.

The course has a broad perspective on communication as it takes place within organizations. Drawing on social psychology, sociology, anthropology and social studies of media use, the course will introduce major theoretical and practical approaches to understanding and designing for uses of media to create and facilitate social reality in organizations. The aim of the course is:
- to provide the students with concepts, theories from the fields of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and practices relevant to communication in organizational contexts
- to provide the students with an understanding of social aspects of information and the role that computer-media play for communication and collaboration
- to enable students to understand and analyze various forms of computer-mediated communication (chat, forums, email, websites…) and computer supported collaboration (groupware, virtual communities, virtual teams…)
- sociability of social representations and cooperation forms (meeting agendas in collaborative software, folksonomies, tagging, collective bookmarks, user defined keywords, blogsoftware, wikis)

The course has a broad perspective on communication as it takes place within organizations.

The course includes but is not limited to the following topics:

- situated action, distributed cognition, activity theory

- virtual organizations, virtual teams

- social representation and speech act theory

- sociology and psychology of virtual groups and online communities:

o decision making in virtual communities

o online demographics: users, lurkers

o empathic communities
o usability and sociability
o cyber ethics and privacy

o social presence, social awareness

-methods to study online social networks and online collaboration

The “CMC” textbook to buy:

Thurlow, C., Lengel, L., & Tomic, A. (2004). Computer mediated communication: Social interaction and the Internet, Sage Publications Ltd., see book website at

http://www.com.washington.edu/cmc/

The other prescribed readings are collected in a compendium which will be available in the CBS bookstore.