| dc.description.abstract | In this master’s thesis I explore the learning that happened through mass collaboration on the virtual canvas hosted by the website Reddit, known as Place. Place was a virtual canvas of 1 000 x 1 000 tiles or pixels. The canvas was opened to the Reddit community in the end of March/beginning of April (depending on time zones) 2017. Everyone with an existing Reddit account could place (sic) a tile of any of the available 16 colours anywhere on the canvas. As the users placed their tiles, the canvas was “painted”, but once a tile was placed, the user placing it was unable to place more tiles for 5 to 20 minutes. Within the first day of the experiment, the users of Reddit organized themselves into communities that collaborated on creating and maintaining images on the canvas. As more groups claimed the virtual territory on the canvas, conflicts and collaboration arose both within and across the communities. Without warning the canvas was closed for further placement, 72 hours after opening. The purpose of this thesis is to describe the mass collaboration aspect of creating the online, non-textual artefact known as Reddit’s Place. The following is my guiding research question: How was the social network around Place structured and how did the participants practice 21st century skills in mass collaboration on Place? The first part of the question explores the network of interactions that took place within and across the different participating communities. Not only will this provide valuable information about the general structure of the interactions and help us understand how Place “worked”, but it can also inform the second part of the question, regarding the qualitative aspects of the interactions. Collaborating over the internet has become an integrated part of many people’s daily lives, at work and at school, and simply for fun. The Norwegian government (through the Ludvigsen report (NOU2015:8) has stated that collaboration, digital competency and creativity are some of the essential competencies for the future. These are among the skills known as 21st century skills. I want to investigate whether participants of Place practiced these, or other, 21st century skills. Method This study is based on a nethnographic approach. Within the framework of netnography I’ve applied and combined two other methods, namely the quantitative social network analysis and the qualitative interaction analysis, making this a mixed methods design. The primary source of data is posts and comments from 7 openly available community forums on the website reddit.com. I have identified three preliminary user types: 1) Single comment participant, 2) Organiser, and 3) Diplomat. Most users were not particularly actively involved in the discussions. There are signs that Place was structured around a changing, loosely connected social network, that also had some stable features, like the average degree of around 2,7. People were connected with others they did not know before, within and across communities. We have seen how some participants were practicing 21st century skills, in particular communication, collaboration, creativity, innovation, social and cross-cultural interaction, initiative and self-direction. This indicates that participation in mass collaboration can provide valuable learning experiences. | eng |