AbstractsSociology

The terms social media and social networking have been under the spotlight in recent times due to enormous success of some of the social networking websites. Creating profiles and making friends are the prime activities on these sites. People upload pictures, videos and create events on these sites to share with their friends. Some people are more active than others when it comes to participating in online social activity. But more or less, most users; be it active or passive find time almost daily to log in and see what is happening on these sites. The aim of this paper is to propose a design for online profiles of researchers and teachers who work in a university environment based on ideas from existing social media and similar systems. In this research I a) identified elements of such a system by studying the already existing profiles of researchers in ten different Swedishuniversities b) interviewed researchers and students at different departments of UppsalaUniversity to get first hand knowledge on how such a system should look like c) propose design recommendations for online profiles of people involved in education in universities based on the requirements collected.