Midterm Exam

Each of the following questions should be answered with no fewer than 1500 words (there is no upwards limit). Please submit your responses as a single document to the midterm dropbox in myCourses, no later than 8pm on Wednesday, April 16.

1) In her essay Identity and Deception in the Online Community, Judith Donath uses Usenet as the subject of her analysis of online behavior. While Usenet has become less important in CMC over the past decade, other collaborative environments have sprung up in its place.

Select a currently active online collaborative environment—it could be a mailing list, a web based forum, a wiki site, a collaborative weblog, or any other kind of technology-based system. Compare and contrast the behavior of individuals in that environment to those described by Donath.

2) Rama and Bishop (2006) outline criteria for “groupware” (or “collaborative software”), and provide a dual-vector system for classifying these tools based on time and space. Situate the environment you identified in question one in their four-quadrant classification system, and determine whether it meets the criteria for groupware that they put forth in their paper. If you think that the time/space quadrant approach is insufficient for classifying such systems, identify additional or alternative vectors that you think would be more appropriate.