Learning the Social Web: A Multidisciplinary Approach

The Social Web is quickly becoming a way of life: millions of people, everywhere, use social network sites to stay connected with their friends, discover new people and activities, and share user-created contents. Moreover, the Social Web phenomenon experiments an astoundingly rapid growth that is not likely to slow down in the near future. At the same time, the borderline between social networks and social media is more and more blurred. This complex and evolving scenario requires a new generation of computer scientists and engineers that understand how to properly design software for supporting and fostering social interactions. This paper describes a university-level experience started four academic years ago with a Social Web course. The course uses a multidisciplinary and active learning approach by requesting the students to design and prototype a Social Web application, and the teachers provide an active support and follow-up along the semester. The paper presents the adopted teaching strategies and analyzes the attained learning outcomes, both from the qualitative and quantitative point of views.