WebSci@UHI is a new undergraduate course on Web Science at the University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI), a partnership of colleges, learning and research centers located throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. WebSci@UHI is a project started in 2010 in collaboration with Moray College, a UHI partner college based in Elgin, Sitekit Labs, the research branch of Sitekit Solutions Ltd. in the Isle of Skye, and the Web Science Trust. The course is taught by me, Ian Barnes, lecturer in computing and IT at Moray College, Chris Eckl, Sitekit Labs research director, and Elizabeth Brooks, subject network leader for computing and IT at UHI. The module provides a thorough and comprehensive introduction to the technological, social, political, economic and psychological aspects of the 20 years of the Web and explores the nature and history of Web Science as an emerging research area, along with the breadth of disciplines that today contribute to Web Science research.

 

BEYOND SPACE
WebSci@UHI is delivered via the UHI ConferenceMe video conference (VC) tool, which allows both students and lecturers to participate in lessons and tutorials from wherever they are located. By use of the discussion board in Blackboard virtual learning environment (VLE) and the WebSci@UHI Facebook page, moreover, students and lecturers can interact both before and after the VC lecture. Space barriers are also important for course contents and logistics. We use Google Docs and Etherpad, for collaboratively edit course slides and documents, email, for organizing course logistics, and Skype, for regular discussions about students’ feedback.

BEYOND TIME
Because I am currently based in Singapore, it is not possible for me to deliver all the lectures live by VC. I have addressed this by preparing lectures in advance, with slides, YouTube video recordings of a prologue and epilogue, and sound recordings to go with most slides. Although this has been a lot of work, it does give us a re-usable resource for future years. Through Blackboard discussion board, moreover, I can keep students engaged and prevent them to feel disenfranchised or marginalized by the use of technology. Interaction and learning climate, in fact, are among the primary determinants of student learning satisfaction with blended e-learning system environments but it is also important to avoid the information overload that could occur if students posted too much or posted contributions not very relevant to the discussion topic.

BEYOND MATTER
As a result of its interdisciplinary nature, WebSci@UHI is offered, for the very first time at UHI, to all degree students across the UHI network of partner colleges and in particular across all disciplines. Since content feature is a primary determinant of student satisfaction with blended e-learning system environments, WebSci@UHI also offers students the possibility to look at Web Science from many different perspectives by involving four guest lecturers, both from the academic and the business world.

COURSE MATERIAL


1. Do you think we still need strict standards now that the basic structure of the Web is already defined? Or shall we let web users develop their own ideas of intelligent web in their own way?
2. With the advent of Web 2.0, responsibility moved from web masters to web users. Do you think that, in the same wake, the Web’s client-server architecture should evolve into a peer-to-peer architecture?
3. Do you believe Web 1.0 is actually “dead”?
4. Do you agree with Tim Berners-Lee’s “layered cake” vision of the Semantic Web? Does the Web really need Trust? Why?
5. Do you think web users will ever bother to semantically organize their contents? Or the Semantic Web is destined to be a sort of technological niche?


1. Now that – with Web 2.0 – the web’s primary role is to facilitate communication and the exchange of content, rather than to act as a giant electronic billboard, are there cracks appearing in the way the web is built – cracks being filled by other uses of the internet?
2. Walled gardens like Apple’s iOS environment and Facebook are becoming more popular – is the internet not really just ‘Business as usual’?
3. Distributed organisation has come to a protest near you – does the web cause or reflect these new forms of organising?
4. Twitter – derided fad, or growing newsmedia machine?
5. Web 3. When? Why?

1. The Web graph is growing exponentially, making information retrieval more and more difficult. Do you think some boundaries should be put to somehow control its expansion?
2. We often talked about the democracy of the Web but, for the preferential attachment process, the Web can also be seen as an oligarchy. Which initiatives (if any) should be taken into consideration to revert the present situation?
3. Is privacy more important than social benefit?
4. Do you see AI and Semantic Web as antagonists or co-protagonists of next generation Web?
5. Do you believe a machine will ever be capable to really understand natural language text?


1. Why has the new research field of opinion mining and sentiment analysis gotten so popular in the past few years?
2. Sentic Computing looks at the task of extracting opinions and sentiments from the Web from many different perspectives. Can you think of other examples of existing holistic approaches to Web-related tasks?
3. Why is affect so important for human reasoning and decision-making processes?
4. Can a machine be conscious? Do you agree with Minsky’s vision of humans as the greatest machines in the world?
5. Research and development have to go hand in hand. But how to ensure that research is not only driven by business?


1. Do you think the ‘jumping curves’ mentality applies more to small or big companies? Why?
2. Do you think any business should always try to ‘surf the wave’ or just those involving research?
3. Which strategies would you adopt to be always aware of which part of the wave you are surfing? That is, how to understand when it is time to ‘jump the curve’?


1. When engineering the future of the Web, do you think online anonymity should be preserved or should we all use a portable online ID? Which benefit/drawbacks would this have?
2. It looks like that the cases of toxic disinhibition are growing much faster than the cases of benign disinhibition. Why do you think phenomena such as trolling are spreading so much? Is web users’ nature mainly negative?
3. Which of the six factors proposed by John Suler to explain the online disinhibition effect are the most influent in benign and toxic disinhibition respectively? Why? Which of these should be preserved and which should be changed in the future Web? How?
4. Is online privacy just an illusion today? How to find a trade-off between the Internet and privacy?
5. In social networking websites such as Facebook, information posted by users is decontextualized and, hence, make these feel like they are deprived of their privacy (when, for example, the wrong people get to know about this information). Do you think published information is to be considered public? Why?


1. Where/how is Web positively/negatively influencing society and viceversa?
2. Do you think that the Social Web’s fast-growing trend is destined to slow down, stabilize or speed up in the next years? Will people ever get tired of interacting online? Which is the next curve/wave (if any) of the Social Web?
3. Do you think the future of collective intelligence lies more on exposition of structured data by the users, automatic extraction of structured data from unstructured data, or adaptive capture of data at the time of sharing? Why?
4. Examples of collective intelligence are the FAQ-o-Sphere, citizen journalism, product reviews and collaborative filtering. Can you think of other examples? Which fields/tasks could benefit from collective intelligence in the not-so-distant future?
5. How to create synergy between human and machines? To which extent/degree should machines be involved in managing user-generated contents? Which constraints (if any) should be defined in order for these to orthodoxically manage social information and ensure its benefit?