Online Communities and Social Computing

Incident analysis is an important activity to maintain the safety of nuclear power plants. Much discussion is required to utilize the collected incidents effectively in the incident analysis activity. On-line Computer Mediated Communication(CMC) activity is an appropriate circumstance for geographically dispersed workers in nuclear power plants to discuss about the incident analysis. Some studies, however, indicate that the discussion activity in CMC tends to stagnate after a short period of time. For this study, the authors developed a discussion system for knowledge sharing and collaborative analysis of incidents, and proposed a method to promote discussion among users through introduction of "Active Participant". The Active Participant always behaves actively, and such behaviors are expected to promote the other members’ incident analysis in the discussion group. To evaluate the effectiveness of the introduction of the Active Participant and obtain concrete guidance of the Active Participant, an experiment was conducted with nuclear power plant workers who were asked to evaluate the discussion system. The results of the experiment show that Active Participant can promote discussion among group members if enough number of incidents are submitted to the discussion system.

In today’s complex metropolitan and aging society, navigation, which is an essential mobility activity, has become increasingly challenging for many individuals. This is particularly true for individuals who are unfamiliar with the area or require special navigation assistance due to visual, physical, or cognitive impairments. While there have been much advancements in navigation systems, they are one-size-fits-all and not universal. In this paper, we present the concept of Universal NAVIgation Technology (UNAVIT), which is a framework providing navigation assistance anywhere, anytime, and for any user through social networking (UNAVIT-SN). We discuss UNAVIT-SN, its components and features, and present key algorithms for providing suitable navigation solutions both indoors and outdoors, at different times and for users with a variety of needs and preferences.

We propose a conceptual framework based on input-process-output models adapted from traditional group research for the systematic analysis of virtual teamwork. A research agenda contains a list of research questions that will be investigated in a controlled field study in the context of “The ShanghAI Lectures”, a global teaching and international student collaboration project. The research questions are formulated regarding processes and outcomes of global virtual teamwork and focus on usability and sociability issues in collaborative work in 3D virtual environments. An operational framework is provided for collecting the relevant data in a structured manner by using qualitative and quantitative process measures of group behavior.

In video annotation research, the support of the video annotation workflow has been taken little into account, especially concerning collaborative use cases. Previous research projects focus each on a different essential part of the whole annotation process. We present a reference architecture model which is based on identified phases of the video annotation workflow. In a first step, the underlying annotation workflow is exemplified with respect to its single phases, tasks, and loops. Secondly, the system architecture is going to be exemplified with respect to its elements, their internal procedures, as well as the interaction between these elements. The goals of this paper are to provide the reader with a basic understanding of the specific characteristics and requirements of collaborative video annotation processes, and to define a reference framework for the design of video annotation systems that include a workflow management system.

Modern Web introduces new means to support conference information retrieval and, moreover, social tools that enable conference delegates to actively contribute to a conference. Simultaneously, existing case studies show that collecting explicitly represented conference data is possible in real-life settings. From these grounds, methods and tools of component-based information visualisation can be used to process conference data, firstly, in order to create visualisations of the conference data, and, secondly, to produce data for populating interactive conference tools. We claim that when coupled with usage tracking and analysis, the automated creation of visualisations and population data can catalyse the iterative development of a conference workspace. In this article, we present case OPAALS 2008 where formal conference data was successfully harvested and utilised to partly automate the creation workflow of the conference workspace. Moreover, we introduce the methods that were used to gain insight on the dynamics of the workspace usage.

We designed and implemented an experimental communication system called BlueSpot, which was functioning for 3 months in Budapest, Hungary. It was a free communication system that connected nearly 50 geographical locations in the city into a network. In BlueSpot users could send messages to localities instead of people using the Bluetooth service of their mobile phones. Messages were received by all users present at the target location. We are describing the system architecture and our experiences with the interaction design of the BlueSpot application. We also provide an analysis of the content of the messages, revealing user experiences in a synchronous location based communication system.

In this paper we introduce an instant online community (IOC) solution as an add-on for existing websites. The IOC enables social interaction between the main content provider and visitors of one or more websites. We present the successful application of the sixgroups.com Livecommunity in the context of a joint conference to support communication between organizers and attendees, and attendees amongst each others. All stakeholders are supported throughout the conference, from preparation until follow-up. Yet, the main focus lies in accompanying them while they are attending the conference. The lessons learned and conclusions from this application are discussed, as well as the steps to be taken in improving the sixgroups.com Livecommunity.

In order to improve the exhibition service, technology enhanced visitor experience is gradually gaining more attention. In this paper, we follow user-centered design to explore the possibility of building a mobile social service for a large-scale exhibition. User data from interviews, questionnaires and field studies have been analyzed. Five factors influencing visitor’s social engagement are analyzed and implications for new mobile social service designs in large-scale exhibitions are discussed: personal requirement on the knowledge of exhibits, time cost of social interaction, exhibitor’s requirement on information distribution and collection, the maintenance of a temporary social network and coordination with the exhibition environment.

This paper discusses the use of social networking sites in higher education and the accessibility issues which arise for students using assistive technologies when they register for these systems. Many instructors incorporate social networking into their daily teaching by creating learning groups, enabling collaborative work, or just by simply synchronizing course items with students’ personal sites within these networks. This study examines the registration process for several social networking sites. Sites were evaluated according to their compliance with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act; evaluation also included the use of CAPTCHAs and the use of email for user identification. The paper concludes with a summary of the current status of registration processes for social networking sites and recommendations on how to improve the situation considering their application in higher education.

During persistent surveillance of a given population in a conflict situation, data management can quickly become unwieldy due to the inundation of low-level information from many, disparate sources. Computational population models can easily fuse and aggregate information input, but there is still the challenge of providing effective data visualization which minimizes information overload and introduces misinterpretation by simplified visualization based on aggregations. Visualizations of the actionable knowledge to the analyst based on the population effects as evidenced by their stratagemical behaviors are needed. Five model classes that study the beliefs of groups and how their beliefs change as a result of events were evaluated for their potential for visualization based on an analyst’s cognitive model of the conflict situation.A visualization approach was developed that can be used for all of the classes of models based on frames of reference for time and physical location within the environment.

This paper reviews some exploratory research focused on developing a usability methodology based on objective biometrics computing using physiological data (ECG, respiration, and GSR sensors, as well as an infrared eye tracker) as well as behavior data (mouse and keystroke input). Following a high level literature review, various biometrics are discussed with the goal of motivating further study into the development of a methodology for usability testing, including the assessment of user satisfaction. Lessons learned and suggestions for future work were also discussed.

The use of social spaces design in social computing has created an economic value in the preservation of cultural heritage. This movement has now motivated the museum community to provide a systematic establishment to support the digital cultural heritage preservation through e-museum. However some of the cultural heritage community knowledge sharing drivers has not been adequately addressed. The significant growth of community based concept shows a great economic importance in producing reliable digital object repositories. We developed a conceptual framework of a community based e-museum (ComE) to facilitate the design of community knowledge sharing in as an attempt to solve the economic issues of sustaining a cultural heritage information system [1]. In this paper we further elaborate the framework by presenting the structural knowledge modeling of the subsystem of the ComE framework within the social technical system frame based on four components of community views. We demonstrate the instantiation by using the traditional Malay textile (TMT) as the cultural artifact as the case study.

Work in paper and chemical factories include controlling several processes and cooperating with several workers. This needs lots of awareness and information sharing. Breakdowns in information sharing can lead to low quality production and unsafe work situations. During last couple of years different social media and web 2.0 applications and services have become popular ways of sharing information in leisure environment. We created a prototype from social media perspective to respond the needs in information sharing in factories. Our electronic notice board prototype (El Nobo) uses a metaphor from process operators’ current work environment and is designed to face the specific needs that occur in the chemical factory process operators’ work. The prototype aims to introduce social media type of working practices to process control work and to test the possibilities of informal cross-organizational information sharing in industrial settings.

Recently, services providing information content that meet the needs of a user’s current location, based on location information obtained by mobile terminals such as cell phones, have been increasing. In line with the widespread use of these Location-Based Services (LBS), digital compasses that obtain bearing information together with location information are also emerging. By using the digital compass with the location information, a higher level of information can be produced. In this paper, a “XingMenu Viewer” for viewing the information menu of a town from intersections using a digital compass is proposed. In the town exploration experiment using this viewer, it was observed that the exminee’s perception of the town had expanded.

Previous studies concerning the accessibility of social networking web sites have revealed that there are components of such web sites which present accessibility problems for users with disabilities, including blind users. This paper discusses the intersection of e-mail accessible and social networking, for blind users. Not only is e-mail an important component of social networking sites, but often, an e-mail address is required for registration. The topic of e-mail and social networking is being studied in the broader context of a multi-stage research study of blind users and their e-mail usage. This multi-stage study is being conducted to understand the usage patterns and accessibility problems encountered by blind users in using both web-based and application-based e-mail. Our hope is that the research study will result in the proposal of new strategies and guidelines for accessible design. This conference presentation will report on the status of the data collection.

One of the recent popular social media platforms is the social networking site (SNS). Thus far, few previous studies have empirically investigated people’s motivations for SNS usage, especially not outside the U.S. This study combines a large-scale quantitative and qualitative research design, by asking 1,200 SNS users an open question regarding their reasons for using SNSs. An important conclusion drawn from a preliminary content analysis is that people often report

many motivational reasons for using SNSs

. The most important reason is to get in contact with new people (31%). The second most valued was to keep in touch with their friends (21%), whereas the third was general socializing (14%). A total of 11 different reasons and several sub-reasons were identified; that all give insight into the personal incentives that drive people to use SNSs and thus contribute to our understanding of how to develop successful social networking online.

This paper presents a system capable of automatically adding gestures to an embodied virtual character processing information from a simple text input. Gestures are generated based on the analysis of linguistic and contextual information of the input text. The system is embedded in the virtual world called second life and consists of an in world object and an off world server component that handles the analysis. Either a user controlled avatar or a non user controlled character can be used to display the gestures, that are timed with speech output from an Text-to-Speech system, and so show non verbal behavior without pushing the user to manually select it.

This paper reports the findings from a second preliminary study concerning the Internationalization of User Interfaces. It is a follow up to an initial study conducted on American users [4]. Undergraduate Zambian subjects from the University of Zambia (UNZA) completed a web-based application to gauge their understanding of cultural variables commonly used in user interface development. In general, the findings indicate a distinct affinity towards culturally familiar attributes. The authors conclude that the use of culturally sensitive variables in development of user interfaces can have an affect on the acceptance of technologies.

We present the results of the assessment of credibility of Information Technology and Communications professionals through the application of a set of heuristic techniques which make it possible to analyze different on-line websites where their curricular data reside. The aim of the current research work is to determine the quality of the public and private institutions through the veracity of the on-line content. We also present a set of binary metrics of quality, credibility and veracity of on-line information, called DECROL (Destroy CRedibility On-Line). These metrics are the result of the comparison of professionals or pseudo professionals in 50 public and private institutions in Spain and Italy.

This paper describes a design of a life-like agent interface system with Second Life avatars on a 3D virtual world. We have implemented our prototype system on the OpenSimulator server, instead of the Linden Lab’s Second Life server. It is open source and a Second Life official viewer can connect it. Although it is still an alpha version and has various problems at present, it has many advantages. Our avatar can be controlled by event-driven. And the script is environment-independent since the other avatars might be changing the world. We have built up our portable experimental environment (our avatar controller, the OpenSimulator server, and the Second Life viewer) on an ordinary laptop PC (Windows Vista). It can run even if it is standalone, without an Internet connection.

Online-communities and user contribution of content have become widespread over the last years. This has triggered new and innovative web concepts, and perhaps also changed the power balance in the society. Many large corporations have embraced this way of creating content to their sites, which has raised concerns regarding abusive content. Previous research has identified two main different types of moderation; one where the users have most of the control as in Wikipedia, and the other where the owners control everything. The media industry, in particular, are reluctant to loose the control of their content by using the member-maintained approach even if it has proven to cost less and be more efficient.

This research proposes to merge these two moderation types through a concept called multidimensional moderation. To test this concept, two prototype solutions have been implemented and tested in large-scale discussion groups. The results from this study show that a combination of owner and user moderation may enhance the moderation process.

Virtual communities that make use of social network site features blend known applications of virtual communities. These communities can be simultaneously social and commercial, organization sponsored and heavily relying on member interaction. We explore modding behavior that allows members to evaluate other members’ contributions both with numerical value and qualitative rating. We show that approximately half of all members received mods on their comments, that the majority of mods given were positive, and that the amount of mods received for a comment was related to the position of the comment in the community website’s thread. Contributing to the emerging literature of social network sites and virtual communities, we discuss implications for theory, future research and management.

In avatar-mediated communication, there is a potential risk of familiarity detraction caused by differences between the appearance of the user and the avatar. However, the personalized avatars did not produce familiarity against the expectation. In this study, deformation rules extracted independently of the aspects of the models are discussed by comparing seven cartoon portraits to the originals. An avatar personalizing tool based on the averaged deformation proportions was developed. It was experimentally confirmed that the personalized and deformed avatars produce more familiarity.

There has been much discussion on remote communication support for a telework that will enable employees to work at remote offices. We have already developed a remote communication support system via embodied avatars based on users’ behaviors. However, there are various problems associated with an avatar-mediated interaction, particularly with regard to the relation between users and their avatars. In this study, we propose the concept of a presence sharing system Ghatcha [GHost Avatar on a Telework CHAir] in which the users’ embodiment is not indicated by the avatars but by the chairs that suggest the presence of avatars. This system provides the same communication space for the users’ embodiment, thus creating a feeling of working alongside remote workers. In this paper, we propose the concept of this system and develop a prototype system. Moreover, the effectiveness of the prototype system is confirmed in the experiment.

This paper analyses the role of distributed leadership and trust in online communities. The team-based informal ethos of online collaboration requires a different kind of leadership from that in formal positional hierarchies. Such leadership may be more flexible and sophisticated, capable of encompassing ambiguity and rapid change. Online leaders need to be partially invisible, delegating power and distributing tasks. Yet, simultaneously, online communities are facilitated by the high visibility and subtle control of expert leaders. This paradox: that leaders need to be

both

highly visible

and

invisible as appropriate, was derived from prior research and tested in the analysis of online community discussions using a pattern-matching process. It is argued that both leader visibility and invisibility are important for the facilitation of trusting collaboration via distributed leadership. Advanced leadership responses to complex situations in online communities foster positive group interaction and decision-making, facilitated through active distribution of specific tasks.

This paper discusses about contemporary literature on computer-mediated metacommunication and observes the phenomenon in two online communities. The results contribute by identifying six general-level patterns of how metacommunication refers to primary communication in online communities. A task-oriented, user-administrated, community (Wikipedia in Finnish) involved a remarkable number of specialized metacommunication genres. In a centrally moderated discussion-oriented community (Patientslikeme), metacommunication was intertwined more with primary ad hoc communication. We suggest that a focus on specialized metacommunication genres may appear useful in online communities. However, room for ad hoc (meta)communication is needed as well, as it provides a basis for user-initiated community development.

Social online services offer communities means for creating and using media content together. The content is jointly used for maintaining relationships and constructing common memories and experiences. Thus, it is very collective by nature. However, few studies have focused on the ways in which communities interact with such

collective content

. We conducted a field study on how four communities create, share, and use content together in order to understand the role of content as part of the social interaction. As the main result, we present the

snowball effect

of interaction. It is based on the reciprocity of participating and giving feedback. We also found that the creation of

light content

plays a role in maintaining the active interaction with content.

We present a small study about information disclosure and awareness of disclosure implications on Couchsurfing.com. Couchsurfing is an online social networking site where users connect with others interested in traveling and staying at each other’s homes. Since users are looking for someone to stay or travel with, they must develop a rapport and trust before traveling. This leads users to share more information on their Couchsurfing profile than they ordinarily would share on mainstream social networking sites such as Facebook or MySpace. After a survey with twenty Couchsurfing users and semi-structured interviews with nine participants, we found participants were generally not concerned with the information they disclosed online and were not aware of how this information could be used against them by malicious third parties. We conclude the paper with a brief discussion of how designers and developers could utilize personas to better inform participants of the implications of their disclosure decisions.

This paper investigates how people attribute individual autonomy to a remotely operated robot. An experiment was conducted in which participants remotely operated a goalkeeper robot to defend its goal from the kicker robot. Participants were assigned to two types of experimental conditions. Participants assigned to the first condition watched video images that captured the motion of the kicker robot from behind the goal. Participants assigned to the second condition watched video images of the kicker robot from the position of the goalkeeper robot. The result suggests that people are not concerned with the avatar’s autonomy when they are focused on the avatar’s situation.

Current users of real-time online communication tools have difficulty recognizing the status of interaction partners. Therefore, initiation dialogue has a risk of unintended interruption of the partner. To overcome the problem, we focused on application-switching (AS) as a potential intelligent activity discontinuity marker for uninterruptibility estimation. Preliminary experiments revealed an uninterruptibility reduction effect of AS. Therefore, we prototyped an acceptable dialogue start supporting agent system that allows users to recognize the uninterruptibility of interaction partners naturally. The system estimates uninterruptibility using AS, keystrokes, and mouse clicks, and presenting the results by avatar posture and motion using overlapping expressions to control the impression of uninterruptibility.

One path to training for cross-cultural competency is through immersion in a target culture, but real immersion can be expensive. Virtual immersion may be a viable alternative, but only if the experience is realistic and compelling enough. The characters in the virtual environment must embody the behaviors of the people in that culture in a way that is realistic and believable to facilitate training. In this paper, we describe a theory-based framework for building interactive cultural characters for cross-cultural training. The framework combines physical and cognitive aspects of behavior to enable more realistic generation of cultural behavior. We describe the theoretical basis for the framework, how it is being used to build interactive characters for cross-cultural training, and reflect on the challenges we have faced and lessons we have learned in doing this work.

We discuss and illustrate alternative analytical strategies for representing coordination networks in innovative virtual communities bounded by production relationships among participants. We use information on email communication networks reconstructed using data from the Apache Open Source project to give empirical contents to our arguments and to substantiate our claims that: (i) Self-organizing networks provide the basic principles of coordination in such communities; (ii) Once in place, deliberate governance arrangements affect coordination patterns within virtual communities; (iii) Structural properties of communication networks change significantly over time depending on their internal organizational logics, and (iv) Affiliation (a.k.a. two mode) networks provide a useful representation for detecting community structures.

It becomes more difficult to find valuable contents in the Web 2.0 environment since lots of inexperienced users provide many unorganized contents. In the previous researches, people has proved that non-text information such as the number of references, the number of supports, and the length of answers is effective to evaluate answers to a question in a online QnA service site. However, these features can be changed easily by users and cannot reflect social activity of users. In this paper, we propose a new method to evaluate user reputation using co-occurrence features between question and answers, and collective intelligence. If we are able to calculate user reputation, then we can estimate the worth of contents that has small number of reference and small number of support. We compute the user reputation using a modified PageRank algorithm. The experiment results show that our proposed method is effective and useful for identifying such contents.

This paper is a report on the building of an online professional social network (http://nm-x.com) supported by a programme of live events, focused on innovation in the digital media content-design and development sector in London, late 2006-present. Starting with a summary of the state of the digital media design and development sector in this period, the Creative London strategy and the development team, the Report then focuses on the interface design issues, the creation of nm-x, and the supporting programme of live events. A reflective conclusion summarises the development and poses some questions and feedback that may be useful for others developing similar projects. A new contribution, a ‘Connections Module’ (allowing semantic links between nodes) is made to Drupal.

User innovation is enabled through the existence of networks. This article examines the architectures of the social network, Facebook, and provides a theoretical discussion of why and how the architectures of Facebook can support a user innovation environment and what factors of the architectures can improve and enhance innovation.

Tagging has emerged as a new means of organizing information, but the inconsistency in tagging behaviors of users is a major drawback which degrades both information organization and retrieval performance. The current study aims to study how the intra-personal consistency of tagging can be improved by proper tag visualization. The effects of visualization of tag frequency and visualization of the relevancy among tags on personal tagging consistency are empirically tested and compared through an experiment with 39 participants. The results show that visualization of tag relevancy improves tagging consistency significantly and reduces mental workload simultaneously; visualization of tag frequency may alleviate perceived physical demand when tag relevancy is visualized. The findings provide clear and meaningful implications for system designers.

Before the web, a strike tended to be between two parties and the communication rules for such crises were clear: the employer funneled all messages through a single spokesperson to maintain control of its image while the union focused most of its efforts on maintaining the morale and commitment of its membership. The web enlarges the audiences for a strike and allows stakeholders to build coalitions against both sides.

During a faculty strike at Acadia University in 2007, student stakeholders developed their own online channels of communication to respond to faculty and administration actions. While the professors walked the picket line and the administrators remained cloistered in University Hall, a lively discourse was taking place on the web in student blogs, facebook groups, and You-Tube.

This reaction to this strike shows how new media can empower outsiders to make sense of events and organize themselves to put pressure on official social structures. In addition, it demonstrates the power of Millennial students to force others to take their views into account.

In the Web 2.0 era, people not only read web contents but upload, view, share and evaluate all contents on the web. This leads us to introduce a new type of social network that is based on user activity and content metadata. Moreover, we can determine the quality of related contents using this new social network. Based on this observation, we introduce a user evaluation algorithm for user-generated video sharing website such as YouTube.

The new generation of web-based communities, Web. 2.0, represents an innovation in terms of users interaction as it becomes increasingly dependent of it. It empowers users to create and manage content, placing them at the core of its success. This paper will propose a Web 2.0 Critical Success Factors (CSFs) theoretical framework. With the widespread popularity of these applications it becomes important to analyze the source of their success and unveil why some are more successful than others. More importantly, it may help Web 2.0 start-ups to understand what features they need to develop to make their applications succeed in an already very populated network.

User Innovation Networks (UIN) has been considered the open innovation model for this century as it functions entirely independently of manufacturers. This paper discusses two UIN cases, Daz3D, as well as Linux Dell and IBM cooperation as regards research challenges about the community of practice and interface used. It concludes that current technology only now started touching global and extreme collaboration for creativity and innovation.

Services of sharing information such as videos or images become popular on the internet. Flickr or Youtube is one of the most successful websites. On the other hand, high quality contents created by professionals today use multi-surround audio or 3-Dimensinal CG. On the internet, web services that consider spatiality of information also have appeared. However, up until now, 2-Dimensional display has been used to get or share the 3-Dimensinal information of web services. As a result, its spatiality was lost and reality that information essentially had also was lost. To solve this problem, firstly we have developed low-cost and scalable 3-D auditory display. In this research, we developed the system for designing sound space that can be reproduced on our auditory display. This system gives us intuitive designing interface like general image processing tool and enables us to share sound space on the web.

Web 2.0 with RIA (Rich Internet Applications) becomes a wide field for social networks and new distributed collective practices. In this paper we explain why and how CODES, a novice-oriented Web-based environment for cooperative music prototyping, provides support to a new practice in which novices in music may produce (not only consume) music cooperatively. CODES stimulates the emergence of new user roles – these users not only create and edit cooperatively their own music but also may participate in discussions and exchange ideas about their contributions. The implications of this Web-based group music making and shared authorship – some of them identified through actual experiments – are also presented.

In this paper we present a newly designed annotation and collaboration component, which has been prototypically implemented on top of an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system. Standard ERP software is often described as being inflexible in respect to personal needs of a single user or a user group. To cope with this problem, theories, and principles from classical

CSCW

research and design were combined with recent developments in

Social Software

and what is now often summarized as

Web 2.0

. Our component is inspired by Web 2.0 principles like user generated content, information sharing, and harnessing network effects. As the central paradigm we applied

social tagging

based on

folksonomies

as e.g. used in del.ico.us, Flickr, and YouTube. In addition best practices from research on

online community building

were used to design a

social annotating component

for ERP systems.

Blog has become one of the most important media among the general public, and the propagation modeling of incidental topics in blogosphere is of great interest in social network studies. Most existing analysis methods are based on the infection models in epidemiology. However, many of these models are inconsistent with the widely observed power-law decay of the propagation velocity. In this paper, the propagation of incidental topics is described by a susceptible infection (SI) model based on the individual fitness. It is proved that the propagation velocity will asymptotically drop with power-law if the fitness density function satisfies certain conditions. Moreover, if the individual fitness is of uniform distribution, analytical solution of propagation velocity can be obtained based on our model. Model verifications are performed on the data from several widely discussed popular topics in Sina Blog and the results show that our model is consistent with the actual propagations.

Approaches to competence development have tended to focus on training to reach a required level of performance in simple and reproducible contexts, rather than in the more complex and hard-to-replicate contexts that characterize real-world projects, especially projects that involve people from other cultures. This paper explores how the Serious Games approach can be exploited to create skills in dealing with cross-cultural issues in project management. The degree of difference this can make to real-world performance is so dramatic that managers who have experienced it are seeing it not as a way to add Incremental Improvements to TEL (Technology Enhanced Learning) but as more of a Radical Innovation – a revolutionary change. Some of the main skills required in project management are reviewed, and different models of cross-cultural analysis applied to understand how the challenges of managing projects are increased by cultural issues. Our testbed for this is an EU project TARGET that is developing the next generation TEL approach. We describe its approach and look at how the TARGET serious game can be designed to achieve enhanced cross-cultural skills in users.

Utilizing the inherent visual qualities of immersive virtual environments can be advantageous for educating students on particular topics. Basic fundamentals in Computer Science curriculums often can be difficult for students to grasp due to high levels of abstraction and various theoretical frameworks used to describe important structures. Virtual worlds such as Second Life® provide a unique medium for education, allowing for the visualization of concepts coupled with the interaction potential that this environment allows. Briefly discussing traditional methods for teaching fundamental topics in several courses, we discuss how Second Life can be integrated into classroom instruction for the benefit of student understanding of complex materials. We outline some of our preliminary observations and student feedback as we begin to use virtual environments in new innovative ways.

This paper discusses video capture as a medium for transferring and reinforcing knowledge using Distance Learning (to be denoted by DL for the remainder of this paper). The area of teaching delivered is computer programming in particular, to the Object Oriented language known as Java, however the techniques introduced are not limited to this sub-discipline of computer science and can be applied to lectures on the theory of databases, formal methods and/or algorithms etc. The software used in this paper is Camtasia which can be applied to the traditional programming languages, including: Java, C++, Visual Basic, C and to the mark-up languages i.e. the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and to Javascript. The paper highlights ways of partitioning a teaching demonstration video into different components to achieve multiple views of a particular topic being discussed. This means that students and lecturers are able to view the demonstration repeatedly and more importantly whilst not in a lecture theatre. Once a video has been produced learners are able to follow lecture notes along with the lecturer’s discussions at their leisure thus making this method of education a Distance Learning mode, capable of reinforcing learner knowledge. The authors have found that this continual exposure to the lecture material greatly enhances student comprehension, enjoyment and participation. These conclusions were ascertained by conducting experiments in which a comparison of student views (on lectures) were determined i.e. a comparison was made between students taking a class in which Camtasia was used with a class in which Camtasia was not used and the results of the questionnaire/survey are summarised in the conclusions. It was found that the students responded favourably to lectures delivered using the Camtasia environment as the programming ideas could be viewed repeatedly thus reinforcing their knowledge. This was mentioned by the majority of the students (in fact 72% of the students from a sample size of sixty students stated this) and it was felt by the authors that this statistic alone would make the creation and research into further applications of the Camtasia software a suitable, appropriate and worthwhile pursuit. In this paper many programming clips are included with the hope that this illustrates the versatility of Camtasia. The lectures delivered and consequently discussed were presented to a first year undergraduate class in Computer Science studying a variety of Computer Science disciplines including: Artificial Intelligence, Multimedia, Business Computing and e-Commerce. The paper commences with a discussion of two DL environments that the authors are associated with, highlighting points and facilities that are common to both, such as peer-peer discussions, lecturer-student discussions and chat rooms. The paper then goes on to include actual lecture material with associated screenshots using the Camtasia software. The screenshots commence with a demonstration of how to set up the JCreator editor on the University of Westminster server, followed by a demonstration of how the required paths must be set to enable the Java platform to locate all the required classes and libraries to function properly. This is followed by screenshots demonstrating the compilation procedure necessary to successfully run a Java program followed by screenshots on how to debug a typical Java program. In the “Time honoured” fashion the traditional HelloWorld program is also demonstrated and run. This is further complimented by demonstrating the recursive add function using the NetBeans editor. More advanced programming techniques are discussed later in the paper including: the creation of a singleton class with a private constructor and the illustration of the concept of inheritance in Java. Thus the programming techniques introduced are of the OO nature (where the OO denotes Object Oriented) subsequently after these topics have been introduced and discussed feedback from the students is obtained as to the success (or not as the case be) of the effectiveness of using such a method for the delivery of the afore mentioned topics. A discussion of a select few applications of each of these DL environments are also included. The paper reviews the advantages and disadvantages for both students and lecturers alike and the paper also considers many of the difficulties in the recording process that arose. Resource implications are also mentioned relative to the production, i.e. the recording, the delivery and the viewing of the demonstration. The paper concludes with comments from lecturers and students as to the suitability of Camtasia as a teaching method.

We present a narrative-based approach to computer-mediated building of cross-cultural competence, and describe work on a case-based approach to the indexing and automated retrieval of culturally specific narratives. The narrative approach to culture reflects an anthropological view of the cross-cultural understanding problem, seeking understanding of cultural factors by creating computational representations of observed and reported narratives operant in various cultures, as well as narratives of cross-cultural interaction. These narratives constitute cases which can be retrieved using case-based reasoning, based on their applicability to a user’s problem or environment, in a particular cultural context. The use of narrative in its original form has the advantage that it can be derived relatively intuitively from experts, literature, and historical record, and in addition to its direct suitability for gaining understanding, may be appropriate for adaptation to social media and simulation through automated agents.

Today’s pre-college students have been immersed in Social Media Systems (SMS) that mediate their everyday interactions. Before students arrive at college they are using typically using blogs, wikis, forums, social connection systems, digital asset sharing systems, and even community game systems to stay connected. When students reach college, their social networks change in both their function and structure. Institutional emphasis is placed upon Course ware/ Course Management Systems (C/CMS) to augment lecture, classroom and discussion section experiences. While a C/CMS may share similarities with their favorite SMS, students do not always experience the same level of social engagement from them as they do with the tools they use outside of the academic experience. This paper examines how students perceive SMS, examines what students consider SMS, and addresses feature differences between SMS and C/CMS mechanisms.

Online games and virtual worlds are playing an increasingly important role in many children’s daily lives, while internet access continues to expand world wide. The confluence of these two trends is creating more opportunities to reach children of different cultural backgrounds throughout the world; to teach them in fun and engaging ways about cultural diversity, inspiring openness and acceptance of other ways of life. This goal lies along a path beset by many hurdles, but these can be overcome by significant technical, pedagogical, and business opportunities to create a positive social impact.

This study examines the use of a class wiki in a course offered to incoming freshmen at a college in central Pennsylvania. The wiki was used to supplement instruction in a classroom-based course. The study shows that the wiki was helpful in building community among incoming students, and also helped them to grow academically in the course. The class wiki also helped foster positive feelings toward the course as well as students’ first semester at the college.

This paper addresses the question how to optimally support projects of students and employees of a higher education institution of computer science by means of a special software environment. At first the motivation to introduce such a supportive system is examined by describing the current situation in the authors’ department of computer science, which is typical for many colleges and universities. On the one hand problems are pointed out, which hamper students and employees in their project work, on the other hand the additional possibilities of a supportive system, which far exceed the ones of a traditional approach, are drafted. The paper shows how a mutual value for students and employees can be generated from the projects by using social software. After the requirements are described we suggest an architecture for such a supportive system and finally the challenges for the implementation and application, which determine the success or failure of the system, are discussed.

This paper describes the e-learning architecture of the National Spanish Distance Learning University of Spain (UNED). The UNED has more than 200,000 users of e-learning systems (most of them, students) so it needed an enterprise architecture in order to ensure the performance of the virtual campus. The core of virtual campus is aLF (active learning framework) supported by dotLRN/OpenACS open source framework that provides the e-learning core services. aLF is was modified to support the EHEA learning model, based in activity curricula, providing full integration with the evaluation model of aLF and three new tools to focus on the student tasks planning.

The social dimension is nowadays recognized as one of the main factors influencing the learning process [1, 2]. In this paper we consider the social dimension developed by a group of students during an online course. To do this, we analyze their interactions during three different collaborative learning activities, i.e. a Jigsaw, a Role Play and a Discussion. By looking at the data showing the level and nature of the social dimension developed within each activity, it is possible to compare the activities themselves, and to reflect on their capacity to foster the social dimension in light of facilitating the overall learning process.

This paper discusses the use of wiki technology in higher education. Wikis are simple online information systems which often serve user communities. In higher education, wikis have been used in a supporting function to traditional courses; however, there is little research on wikis taking on a larger role as learning environments. This paper explores how wikis support goals of constructivist learning environments, especially communal constructivism theory. Further, it summarizes results of current research using wikis in the classroom and considers elements which can improve the use of wikis for learning. The paper concludes with a proposal of nine guidelines to improve the use of wiki technology as learning environments in higher education.

The mobile computing represents a new possibility for the people “learning while doing” their everyday activities. The advent of mobile devices has created new opportunities that go beyond the simple communication; their software interfaces have a primary role in enabling the communication and collaboration among the evolved parties. In a learning environment for informal education, it is essential to design interfaces that minimize the interaction difficulties and maximize the learning activities itself. To achieve this, in this work is presented a design proposal and prototype of a mobile phone interface for mobile collaborative discussion. The proposal combines mobile learning with collaborative learning, stimulating the constitution of communities of practice aiming to promote the informal education.

Many online movie sites or music sites offering recommendation services employ a collaborative filtering technique archived by analyzing customers’ satisfaction rating, evaluation, search history, download records etc. This approach, however, has difficulty with reflecting individuals’ perosonalities and their own taste for the recommendation. Exploiting such emotional data to a film recommendation remains a challenge in the present. To solve this, we propose an emotion words selection method usable for the collaborative filtering. Through the proposed emotion-based collaborative filtering method, a recommendation system can exploit individuals’ emotional differences on the movie items for the recommendation process. This approach was proven by gathering users’ emotion words selection and satisfaction rating data on several films, and comparing them with MBTI (Myers-Briggs Type Indicator) that is a representative psychometric test for measuring psychological preferences and personalities. This study assumes that individual’s movie taste is much related to the personalities classifiable by MBTI types, because movie taste and evaluation on a movie is influenced by individual’s subjective matters. The results of this study show that emotion words based collaborative filtering method is appropriate for extracting users’ MBTI types. Thus, if a recommendation service offers users films based on their MBTI types, the users can be recommended more customized films.

This paper reports the overview for the understanding of Islamic culture from the perspective of Islamic experts and Muslims based on the commonalities found in Hofstede’s cultural dimension and Islamic worldview values. The understanding was gained from Wan Abdul Rahim et al. (2008) and a replication survey of VSM ‘94. We used this understanding as the benchmark for conducting experimental study to examine the time performance of Muslim online user in searching and purchasing books from two separate websites. The two websites were imposed with Islamic dimensions based from; (1) religious interpretation and; (2) user perception. The results of the paired-samples t-test showed that website imposed with Hofstede’s dimension from religious interpretation is the better ones. Thus provide the indication that website that displays the cultural dimensions based on the religion prescriptions, will has a positive affect on the performance level regardless the current changes of the state of culture.

Mobile devices can help digital students reach out across cultures to develop intercultural competence, improve learning, and provide course support for a variety of course topics. Intercultural competence is expressed through openness, cognitive adaptability, and behavioral flexibility toward unfamiliar cultures. Digital students demonstrate a behavioral flexibility toward technology use that can be leveraged to encourage students to embrace cultures different from their own. This paper explores the feasibility of using mobile devices as viable options for course support by utilizing traditional learning styles and cultural learning styles. From the conducted survey preferred networks are identified for creating a community to support mobile learning.

Game developers have begun applying formal human-computer interaction (HCI) principles in design. Desurvire et al [2] adapted a set of Heuristics for productivity software to games. The resulting set, presented at CHI 2004, was

Heuristics to Evaluate Playability

(HEP). Generalization of these heuristics is required to make them applicable to a multiple of game genres and game deliveries. This follow-up study focused on the refined list, Heuristics of Playability (PLAY), that can be applied earlier in game development as well as aiding developers between formal usability/playability research during the development cycle. Heuristics were formed based on their efficacious scores on the popular game review website, metacritic.com. Fifty-four gamers rated High and Low ranked games on 116 potential heuristics. Implications for how these Heuristics will help developers improve game quality are discussed. PLAY has been found useful in design evaluation and elf-report survey format.

Online game cheating is a rampant misbehavior in the domain of online gaming. However, there is still lack of research in attempt to understand online game cheating. Hence, this paper focuses on the available literature on cheating and gaming to explore and understand the phenomenon of online game cheating. This paper examines the frameworks of cheating and how virtual community is affected by this misbehavior. This paper also explores the concept of fairness in gaming. The implications are discussed in conclusion.

Recent trends in computer-mediated communication research suggest that “flow theory” may provide new applications of understanding within the field human-computer interaction (HCI). Csikszentmihalyi [1] refers to flow as an optimal experience issuing in a feeling of psychological immersion, energized focus, absolute involvement, and change to positive emotions. This study hopes to facilitate an understanding of flow and telepresence as applied to immersive online virtual worlds such as Second Life (SL), where players may lose their sense of time and connection with their present reality of space. Our study tested two hypotheses: (1) that participants experience flow while playing SL and (2) that flow can be correlated with telepresence. Based on our findings, indicators suggest that flow was experienced in SL based on four controlling factors related to being present in a virtual world and that there are considerable correlations that can be drawn between flow and telepresence.

In this paper, we describe lexical rule-based approach to affect sensing from text, and application of the developed Affect Analysis Model in 3D virtual world Second Life. To enrich user experience in virtual environment, to automate emotional behaviour of avatar and to avoid thus manual control by user, we developed EmoHeart object that, driven by the result of Affect Analysis Model, triggers animations of avatar facial expressions and visualizes emotion by the heart-shaped textures.

Games are increasingly being used as educational tools, in part because they are presumed to enhance student motivation. We look at student motivation in games from the viewpoint of attribution theory, which predicts more learning by students who make attributions along certain dimensions, and thus may provide a way of examining this claim in more detail. We studied 13 students as they played a game designed to teach negotiation skills in a cultural context. Students’ overall attributional style was surveyed, as well as their achievement attributions following each meeting with a game character. Correlational results show that unexpectedly, students’ attributional style does not predict in-game attributions. However, characteristics such as gender, negotiation expertise, and frequency of game play are significantly correlated with particular in-game attributions. Because attributions have been show to be causally related to learning, with further study, such results might be used to positively influence educational game design.

In this paper we describe the development of a multi-player computer game created to train the intercultural competence and metacognitive agility (self-awareness and self-regulated learning) of United States Army Special Forces team leaders. We describe a unique design that features a novel role for real-time, in-game peer performance assessment and feedback to encourage user reflection and self-explanation. We also discuss how the multiplayer game is successfully used in Special Forces intercultural communication education and offer user feedback results from a study conducted with 51 Special Forces officers.

This paper explores the intrapersonal and interpersonal motivations involved in the playing of MMORPGs, and the impacts of gaming on online and offline relationships. Twenty-one participants completed an online synchronous interview in which they discussed their personal experiences of playing MMORPGs. An online survey was then developed to further explore the findings of the interviews and this was completed by 52 participants. A content-analysis of the interview transcripts showed that interpersonal factors (such as social communication and group cohesion) were the strongest motivators for game-playing, supporting previous research [1]. The interview data also showed that there tended to be conflict, rather than integration, between online and offline relationships, however the questionnaire data showed the opposite. This was a small-scale pilot study and a further larger study is planned which will investigate whether Social Identity Theory can be used to explain players’ perceptions of group and personal identity.

The eerie feeling attributed to photo-realistic human-like video game characters may serve as a usability obstacle leaving viewers dissatisfied with a particular character for a video game. This study investigates the relationships between user satisfaction and perceived strangeness and between user satisfaction and human-like appearance for virtual characters. 65 participants were asked to rate 13 video clips of 12 different virtual characters and one real human. The results indicate that the Uncanny Valley does serve as a usability obstacle with a strong correlation between a user’s satisfaction rating and the perceived strangeness for a character, with the characters rated the strangest being the least satisfactory. Whilst there was still a positive correlation between human-like appearance for a character with user satisfaction, this was not as significant, with stylised and anthropomorphic characters perceived to be as satisfactory or more so than those of a photo-realistic human-like appearance.

The paper presents the players’ implicit views on psychological aspects of a supposable influence of computer/online/video-games on human beings. And online survey with 74 Likert-type questions were given to adults and older adolescents (16+). The collected replies (N=437) were grouped into an eight-factor model. The key implicit representations include the participants’ belief that gaming: (1) leads to positive self-development, (2) affects the players’ somatics, i.e. causes tiredness and stresses while gaming and in an after-game period, (3) brings pleasing feelings while gaming, (4) stimulates cognitive processes, and (5) supports players’ relaxation and gives pleasure.

Mobile phones are currently shipped with pre-installed games all around the world. In most cases, these pre-installed games contain very little elements of sharing local heritage, traditional values and beliefs. Naturally, such pre-installed mobile games are provided with a different intent and under various commercial contexts. This paper looks at the design and development of intercultural mobile games aimed for backpackers. This is to allow backpackers to socialize, to share and to learn new cultures during their travels. User evaluation studies were conducted to collect the backpacker’s feedback and to improve on conceptualization during the design process. The results were used collectively to provide input for improving the design concepts and interfaces. Screenshots of the mobile games are provided. In general, the results highlight important considerations when deploying an intercultural mobile game to backpackers.

The Brazilian society is characterized by vast differences with regard to socio-economics, culture as well as access to technology and knowledge. In this scenario, Information and Communication Technology, especially hypermedia systems, could benefit citizen, allowing access to knowledge, communication and collaboration. Current social networks systems were not conceived to address the challenges of an inclusive society. In this paper, we discuss some relevant design issues, elicited from a participatory approach, to the design of such systems. The exploratory design process starts with the elicitation of the different views among users, designers and developers, passes through design concepts definition and gets to a first approximation to a user interfaces design.

City Ragas is a photo exchange game in which people in different cities are directly linked with each other through mobile phones and engage in a visual dialogue. Every team has the goal to create a storyline by exchanging pictures. This visual dialogue opens up avenues for cultural exchange and direct interaction enhances understanding of each other and forms the basis for a strong involvement between inhabitants of two possibly distant cities. The intercultural mobile game, City Ragas, has been developed by Waag Society (Amsterdam, The Netherlands) in collaboration with the media lab Sarai (New Delhi, India). It uses mobile technology to disclose the themes of cultural identity and heritage.

While, the need of assessing public spaces, services and officers becomes, always more urgent and mandatory, a wide literature and extensive field experience show that

internal audit

by the public sector itself is not sufficient. There is the need to foster the

civic accountability

byintegrating an independent external evaluation in the audit process. The paper investigates the possibility that online communities provide a suitable framework for carrying on this

external audit

by supporting the so-called

voice strategy

in the contexts (such as the public sector) where the

exit strategy

does not hold. After envisaging the potential advantages coming from involving online communities of users in the assessment of a public space, service or officer, two early pilot experiments carried on to validate this assumption are presented and discussed. They are neither sufficient to validate the assumption nor sufficient to invalidate it, but provides hints helpful to pursue the investigation.

This review provides a snapshot of the literature in online communities for healthcare consumers. It summarizes the features commonly used by healthcare consumers in online communities: seeking and sharing personal experiences, opinions and answers, and exchanging social support. This review also identifies behaviors that are commonly practiced by healthcare consumers but are not readily supported in current online communities. These include collaborative healthcare decision-making, conducting social comparison, and lurking in online communities. This review concludes by emphasizing the importance of trust, privacy and safety when designing an online community for healthcare consumers, particularly in the age of Web 2.0.

Personal Health Records (PHR) allow patients to carry their own health records in some format for their own review purposes as well as across doctors and other care providers. This study aimed at determining the usability and user acceptance issues involving a Web-based personal health record system. The study indicated that such a Web-based system was found useful by the patients and they would be willing to enter and retrieve information regarding their own health from the system. A usable interface allows mobility and ease of information sharing using the system.

In recent years, several case studies have emerged illustrating the impact of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and in particular the expansion of the Internet and mobile cell phones on socio-political activities. This paper investigates 146 economies and the relationship between the global expansion of ICTs and the current degree of democracy within each nation by constructing an index of e-democracy opportunities among them, for the period of 1995 to 2005. The key findings in this study are (a) a notable progress in e-democracy opportunity on the global stage; (b) the fact that in some countries there is a rapid ICT expansion and global success in e-democracy, and yet, there is a growing digital divide between the most and least developed e-democratic nations.

Online social networking services are hot in the recent years, but most of theses services in China aimed at the college students and business people, ignoring that Chinese migrant workers could be one of the biggest potential user groups of mobile social networking services in the future. This paper presents an ethnographic user study on Chinese rural-urban migrant workers’ social networks in daily life and proposes a new mobile social networking service concept design for helping them to improve their social networks in daily life.

Appropriate use of medications can improve the health of seniors and other patients, but inappropriate use or misuse can lead to adverse side effects, deterioration, and other conditions that may result in either more medical visits, hospitalizations or even death. This study aimed at exploring how senior people manage their daily medication and the acceptance towards the medication management technology and the service in assisted living facilities. Results of an online questionnaire survey with senior participants suggested that the online senior communities manage their medication in three ways: managed based on memory or routines, assisted by medication management tools, or helped by other members in the family. Although medication management technology is in low usage rate, participants showed positive attitude towards medication management service and accepting technology as a method to improve medication adherence, with the concerning issues on user acceptance, usability, and user preference.