Assessment

Ke and Hoadley's article discusses research about evaluating the online learning communities. The authors state that in order to learn if online communities of practice make a difference or not, we need to first define the term "effectiveness." Is the effectiveness of online learning communities depend on the context in which it is used?

The article also argues that the higher the social ability the more successful you will be in online community of practice. My question is... What characteristic of social ability would help people become successful in CoP?

Class Notes April 27

Health and Support Groups

HutchWorld's article concludes that Internet access has a meaningful impact on the quality of people's lives under circumstances of stress and social isolation. I find it true with a lot of people and with access of information available. How can the reliability of medical information be improved on internet?

Shaw's article describes how computer-mediated social support can benefits patients and specifically talks about "how women with breast cancer experince the giving and recieving of social support in computer-mediated context." My question is how anonymity within the support group fostered equilized participation?

Social Presence

In the article, Gunawardena concludes by saying that instructors need to learn to adapt to telecommunications media by developing interaction skills that create a sense of social presence. What are these interaction skills that can impact students' perception of interaction and social presence?

How can instructors increase social presence to positively impact students' learning in online environments?

Reputation and Trust

In Six degrees of reputation David and Pinch mention both advantages and disadvantages of online review and recommendation systems. My questions is: How can we trust the authenticity of a reviews on any review system? How can the reliability of reputation systems be improved?

Participation/community network

In the McDonald article, the study propose that acceptance of lurking depends on the goals of the organizations or groups. For example, if the focus is on knowledge management then a lurker would be seen as not contributing to the group, while a learning organization would find lurking as acceptable learning approach. I agree with this claim and think that in any CoP, goals of community and expectations from the participants should be clearly stated in order to have a successful CoP. I believe that contributions from all the participants are very important in order to have an effective CoP. What if most of the participants are lurkers in a CoP? How would knowledge be constructed or learning occur?

The article by Lakhani was interesting to read and learn why people are motivated to provide free information and help services to online support/help systems. Some of the motivations mentioned in the article are: learning benefits from reading questions, gain valuable information for themselves by learning about others problems, enjoy programming, and enhance reputation by helping others. I wonder if any or all of these implications are true for online CoP or e-learning communities?

Week 8: Friendship and Relationships

In the article, McKenna said that relationships develop closeness and intimacy significantly faster over the internet than offline, because of the greater ease of self-disclosure. I think we cannot generalize this statement. If we reverse this statement it will be true for many other people. Wouldn't it take more time to develop closeness and intimacy because of the disinhibition and self-disclosure over the internet than offline? What if the other person is not expressing his/her real self?

McKenna also said in the article that relationships made on the internet last longer and become part of the real life. I wonder how would internet affect the existing F2F relationships once they become completely offline?

Week 7: Web 2.0 Behaviors

The Online Disinhibition Effect

The author (John Suler) explored six factors that affect how people self-disclose or act differently than in person. Moreover, he said that different means of communication (e-mail, chat, and video) as well as different environments (social, vocational, fantasy) facilitate diverse expressions of self. This made me think that how do these factors impact social computing? Specifically how would these factors effect (negative and positive) users themselves as compared to the other people interacting with them? and how to build trust and validate identity in online communication?

Social networking sites; Definition, History, and Scholarship

In Boyd and Ellison's article, authors mention (page 219) a research finding that I found very interesting that “where SNSs are gaining popularity worldwide, at the same time many companies are blocking their use by their employees.” I am wondering about the reasons behind this fact?