Reference no: EM133636514

Homework: Concept Map- Social Media, Peer Production, and Leveraging the Crowd

The goal of a concept map is to simplify complex concepts using circles, boxes, and all sorts of shapes and icons to represent ideas and lines to connect them together. For example, lawyers might use concept maps to outline arguments. By presenting their arguments to their team in a concept map, they could get feedback and uncover faults or gaps in their reasoning.

Concept maps were developed by Joseph Novak at Cornell University to represent students' science knowledge. They are similar to mind maps, but unlike mind maps, need not branch out from one central idea.

Concept maps are a graphical tool that is used to visualize meaningful relationships among concepts, processes, or events. It's used as a knowledge representation tool, meaning they basically represent the knowledge structure that we store in our minds about a certain topic. Both simple and complex concept maps consist of two things: concepts and relationships among them.

The concept map focuses on a single concept, process, or event of interest found in Social Media, Peer Production, and Leveraging the Crowd. Lines link the related concepts or processes with a word or phrase that describes the nature of the relationship between two components. Concept maps start with broad, general relationships and build on them to create very complex visual models of how many factors interact to produce a given outcome.

Your task in this homework is to create a concept map, drawing upon the ideas in Social Media, Peer Production, and Leveraging the Crowd as outlined. Consider:

A. Recognize the unexpected rise and impact of social media and peer production systems.
B. Understand how these services differ from prior generation tools.
C. List the major classifications of social media services.

Here is a general procedure for making a concept map.

I. Develop a central question that will serve as the focus for your concept map. The question will help you focus on relationships between the concepts, processes, or events included as nodes in the concept map. Look at the learning objectives in your textbook. Turn one of the learning objectives into a question and then look through the textbook to find topics in the book that are related. Just write all of the topics that you find down (look for 20 to 25).

1. For my example, the question is, "How are Social Networks used by individuals, groups, and corporations?"

II. List the 5 to 8 factors that you can identify to begin to answer the focal question about Social Media, Peer Production, and Leveraging the Crowd. Look at the Learning Objectives found throughout Chapter 9 of your textbook to help identify the factors. List the major factors that you can identify to begin to answer the central question. Your objective is to articulate the major factors that contribute to finding an answer to this central question. These major factors form the first tier of nodes.

1. For my example, the major factors could be (i) electronic social networks, (ii) modern social networks, (iii) privacy concerns, (iv) network effects and cultural differences, (v) public social networks within private organizations, (vi) site mining

III. Now expand on each of these major factors in a cluster. Add detail in the form of secondary concepts (nodes) that contribute to the major factors or concepts you have already identified.

1. For my example, I will expand on five public social networks within private organizations and consider Social Network Listings as a secondary concept. They are easy to update and expand, and employees are encouraged to add their own photos, interests, and expertise to create a living digital identity. Alumni Listings might be another secondary concept because these networks can be useful in maintaining contacts for future business leads, rehiring former employees, or recruiting retired staff to serve as contractors. These secondary concepts interact with each other. Social Network Listings directly impacts Alumni Listings since maintaining these networks will be critical in industries like IT and health care where worker shortages have been predicted.

IV. Continue to build your concept map with at least two more tiers or layers of nodes answering your central question. Your completed concept map should have a first layer that includes the major factors that directly affect concepts, processes, or events. Add at least two more layers, or tiers of nodes, in each of those clusters. You are free to include as many layers or tiers as needed.

1. For my example, the third tier continues to expand on the Social Network Listings where finding Employee Expertise, within the firm, to organize virtual work groups, and for communication across large distances is critical. There will be Organization Flattening and Value-Adding Expertise Sharing to consider using Employee Expertise.

V. Think of your concept map as a visual explanation. Imagine using your concept map to explain the influence of the identified major concepts to answer your central question. Your map should make the relationships clear. Use lines to indicate the relationship between nodes and include a word or short phrase to describe the relationship.

VI. The Word document accompanying the concept map includes four components:

A. Include the central question you used as a starting point for the concept map.

B. Describe how and why you selected the concepts (nodes) included in your concept map.

C. Explain the overall logic in the organization of your concept map describing in more detail the relationship between concepts (nodes).

D. Provide a summary of how the concepts (nodes) that you included in the concept map answer the central question.