Abstract:

Universities are huge and rarely ordinary people know what is being produced there. How can society identify who knows what in a University? Where are the experts? Where are the researchers with the same scientific interest? How can someone map the knowledge produced in University? Those are some questions that motivated the development of ACTIVUFRJ, an Academic Network that supports university activities.

ActivUFRj is an academic network developed by undergraduate and graduated students supervised by researchers to support social and academic activities. It is always incorporating new services and tools required by users. Design using Cutting-edge technology used in Facebook, it can have thousand active users connected in the same time.

ActivUFRJ supports many activities: disciplines, advice, projects, events, team labs, etc. Focusing on the interaction and communication between the users there is chat, blog, microblog, messages, forum, news. Its design allows the collective construction of knowledge through wikis, blogs, file sharing, favorite websites and many other tools. The intellectual property of the students is available to the students of the next classes. Allowing disciplines to have a spiraling construction of knowledge. The intellectual heritage of the university is intangible. However, ActivUFRJ makes the University Legacy tangible.

ActivUFRJ is an official social network of Federal University of Rio de Janeiro since 2010. Anyone of the academic community can have a profile. Undergraduate students do their final graduation work developing new services as a recommender system to recommend opportunities (Professional internships, scientific initiation) to users. Graduated students develop their thesis working a reputation model. ActivUFRJ has dynamic construction by students that direct its future.

In this paper we will describe different aspects of ActivUFRJ utilization showing how this academic network can change the university pedagogy, how it gradually is mapping academic knowledge and how this utilization allow that academic legacy can be explicity.

Keywords:

Social network, academic network, computer supported collaborative work, collective inteligence.