Learn more about this course.

What is it about the Web that fascinates you?

Watch Prof Les Carr and Prof Susan Halford discuss what drew them to Web Science from their respective backgrounds in computer science and sociology.

In this short video you meet Professor Les Carr and Professor Susan Halford, the lead educators, who talk about what drew them to Web Science.

In this step we would like to encourage you to join our global community and add yourself onto our interactive map. We also introduce you to our online facilitation team and give you more information about what this course is about.

From watching Les and Susan, you’ve found out what it is about the Web that fascinates them. What is it about the Web that fascinates you?

Join the global community

We’d love to find out more about you.

Where in the world are you?

Add yourself to our interactive map below. Here is how to do this:

Click on the link.
At the top left of the map click the tab marked ‘Additions’.
Choose ‘Add Marker- Simple’.
Type your name in the Entry Name field. We suggest that you use only your first name for security reasons.
Type your location in the location field (e.g. your city & country). Alternatively you can use the ‘click on map location’ feature. Please don’t put your full address for security reasons.
Hit submit!

Once you have added yourself to the map, please click the ‘back button’ on your browser to come back here. Then introduce yourself in the comments area and tell us what it is about the Web that fascinates you.

Go to the Interactive Map

Your online mentoring team

During the course, Web Science PhD candidates Johanna Walker and Manuel Leon will be supporting Les and Susan.

You can follow them by clicking the links to their FutureLearn profile pages and selecting ‘follow’. That way, you’ll be able to see all the comments that they make.

What is this course about?

The World Wide Web has changed the world. It has changed the ways we communicate, collaborate, and educate. We increasingly live in a Web-dependent society in a Web-dependent world. The Web is also the largest human information construct and it is growing faster than any other system.

However, it is a striking fact that there is no systematic discipline to study the Web.

We need to understand the current, evolving, and potential Web but at the moment we have no means of predicting the impact that future developments in the Web will have on society or business.

Web Science aims to anticipate these impacts.

It is the study of the social behaviours in the Web at the inter-person, inter-organizational and societal level, the technologies that enable and support this behaviour, and the interactions between these technologies and behaviours.

Having successfully completed this Course, you will:

have knowledge and understanding of the Web as a socio-technical phenomenon;
be able to discuss the evolution of the Web;
have an awareness of current and emerging research questions for Web Science.

Video update on the week’s activities

Our mentoring team will be sharing their thoughts on the week’s activities via a near real-time video update on our YouTube channel. The link will be posted on step 1.14 no later than the 19:00 GMT Saturday 8th July 2017.

If you have any questions for the team, please either add these into the comments on step 1.14 or use the course hashtag #FLwebsci on Twitter. Please use the ‘Like’ buttons as we will be looking to answer the most popular questions.