ICT158 Introduction to Information Systems

Workshop 7 – Types of Information Systems: Social IS

This week’s workshop has some exercises relating to the material in Topic 7: Types of
Information Systems: Social IS.

The exercises are to be handed in as part of your e-Portfolio submission 2. Answer the
questions in the exercises, and include a section for your reflection on how they fit into the
week’s topic and your learning.

Students can work in pairs or small groups to discuss the exercises, but you should write up
the work individually.

At the completion of this tutorial you should have gained practice in:

 Identifying opportunities for an organisation to use different types of social

media as part of its business strategy
 Identifying potential risks to organisations from social IS, and policies or
guidelines to counteract them
 Identifying opportunities for an organisation to make use of crowdsourcing.

TO DO:

Exercise 1: Extending the face of the organisation using social media

Choose an organisation (either from the examples provided in previous workshops, or a

‘new’ one) and investigate how it is using:
 its official web page
 blogs
 Facebook
 Twitter
 any other social media, such as YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, Google+, etc.

(Choose an organisation that uses several different types of social media.)

Report (one or two paragraphs only) on how the organisation is using each of these
social media applications to addresses its business objectives. Highlight the similarities
and differences between each usage: for example, what message is it trying to convey
via each media platform? Is it targeting different types of audience via each medium?

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Exercise 2: Social media guidelines within the organisation

What risks might your selected organisation face through its employees’ interactions
with social media? Does it have any social media policy or guidelines for its employees?
If it has, summarise it. If it hasn’t, suggest some guidelines that would be appropriate.
(Look at the social media policies of some other organisations for ideas.)

Exercise 3: Crowdsourcing

Investigate some of the crowdsourcing sites listed below to see how they operate and the
incentives and safeguards that are built in.

How might your organisation make use of crowdsourcing in its business operations or
research? Be as innovate as you like!

Ideas and problem solving

InnoCentive https://www.innocentive.com/
Dell IdeaStorm http://www.ideastorm.com/

Task completion
Galaxy Zoo http://www.galaxyzoo.org/
Distributed Proofreaders http://www.pgdp.net/c/ walkthrough at
http://www.pgdp.net/d/walkthrough/00_Main.htm
Amazon Mechanical Turk https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome

User-contributed content
iStockphoto http://www.istockphoto.com/
Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About

Design
DesignCrowd http://www.designcrowd.com.au/crowdsourcing
99 designs http://99designs.com.au/

COMPLETING THE WORKSHOP

Complete this workshop by writing up your findings to exercise 1, 2 and 3 as an ePortfolio

report. Your ePortfolio should answer the questions asked in the exercise, and summarise
your findings. It should also include a section for reflection on what you have learned,
particularly in relating the exercise to
 the week’s topic
 the unit in general
 your own experience.

An example of an e-Portfolio report (from a different unit) is available on Learning

Management System (LMS).