The notion of social capital (SC) is increasingly used as a framework for describing social issues in terrestrial communities. For more than a decade, researchers use the term to mean the set of trust, institutions, social norms, social networks, and organizations that shape the interactions of actors within a society and that are considered to be useful and assets for communities to prosper both economically and socially. Despite growing popularity of social capital especially, among researchers in the social sciences and the humanities, the concept remains ill-defined and its operation and benefits limited to terrestrial communities. In addition, proponents of social capital often use different approaches to analyze it and each approach has its own limitations. <p>This thesis examines social capital within the context of technology-mediated communities (also known as virtual communities) communities. It presents a computational model of social capital, which serves as a first step in the direction of understanding, formalizing, computing and discussing social capital in virtual communities. The thesis employs an eclectic set of approaches and procedures to explore, analyze, understand and model social capital in two types of virtual communities: virtual learning communities (VLCs) and distributed communities of practice (DCoP). <p>There is an intentional flow to the analysis and the combination of methods described in the thesis. The analysis includes understanding what constitutes social capital in the literature, identifying and isolating variables that are relevant to the context of virtual communities, conducting a series of studies to further empirically examine various components of social capital identified in three kinds of virtual communities and building a computational model. <p>A sensitivity analysis aimed at examining the statistical variability of the individual variables in the model and their effects on the overall level of social capital are conducted and a series of evidence-based scenarios are developed to test and update the model. The result of the model predictions are then used as input to construct a final empirical study aimed at verifying the model.<p>Key findings from the various studies in the thesis indicated that SC is a multi-layered, multivariate, multidimensional, imprecise and ill-defined construct that has emerged from a rather murky swamp of terminology but it is still useful for exploring and understanding social networking issues that can possibly influence our understanding of collaboration and learning in virtual communities. Further, the model predictions and sensitivity analysis suggested that variables such as trust, different forms of awareness, social protocols and the type of the virtual community are all important in discussion of SC in virtual communities but each variable has different level of sensitivity to social capital. <p>The major contributions of the thesis are the detailed exploration of social capital in virtual communities and the use of an integrated set of approaches in studying and modelling it. Further, the Bayesian Belief Network approach applied in the thesis can be extended to model other similar complex online social systems.

In the networks of relationships that influence others behavior and attitude are called opinion leaders. The two-step flow theory suggests that information through a variety of media will receive by opinion leaders, and the opinion leaders will spread the information and have the effect to other people. Today's consumer market companies often offer a trial to the high popularity bloggers for product placement, to establish a positive attitude, good reputation, and to enhance consumers purchase behavior. The views of opinion leaders in the virtual community, either positive or negative affect, all have impact to the members of the community (Bansal & Voyer, 2000). In this study, we view the Xbox LIFE community website as a research field, and use depth interviews of qualitative research as a major research method. Through the depth interview we can know the type difference of community website members and understand how the opinion leaders in the community convey the information. In this study we found that opinion leaders¡¦high degree of participation and professional knowledge in the community played a great influence in the community. The opinion leaders¡¦ speeches and views have also become the main sources to the members of the group.This study will help enterprises to seek more marketing-effective way in use online WMO(word of mouth) in the future. From this study we can find that to operate the community website are not just set up the fan pages just because the community websites are in vogue. We must discover the key to affect the community websites¡¦ members, and create the way to bring the community members together. That is the key to promote brand and service.

The main aim of this thesis is to present an ethnographic study of the Nusayri community in the Karaduvar district of Mersin to examine how it negotiates maintaining religious teachings and practices secret in the process of interacting with other communities and reproducing Nusayri belief. In addition to ethnographic field research in Karaduvar, two virtual communities that Nusayris frequent were studied to examine the negotiations on the revelation of Nusayri esoteric knowledge and secret ritual practices. The ethnographic data were collected during two months of fieldwork in Karaduvar and twelve months of online study of two virtual communities. Research findings show that although the intentional concealing of Nusayri religious knowledge and ritual practices have historically played an important role in the survival of the Nusayri community and belief, partial revelation of secrets are becoming more common and acceptable. Both the internal dynamics of the Nusayri community and the socio-political context in Turkey have contributed to this process. The result of the continuous negotiations among Nusayri sheikhs and followers is that while social secrecy is increasingly revealed, esoteric secrecy is maintained to a large extent. The dosclosure of secrecy is particularly supported by younger generations, university graduates, Nusayri intelligentsia, and those Nusayris who live outside of their hometown.

An electronic advice network provides employees opportunities to tap diverse experts within the organization at an unprecedented speed and scale. It is formed when an advice seeker initiates an online discussion thread joined by members of various communities, each specializing in a specific domain. This dissertation recognizes the substantial gap in our understanding of how to best harness the performance potential of expertise diversity provided through an electronic advice network within a firm. It thus investigates the process by and conditions under which expertise diversity in an electronic advice network promotes the advice seeker’s learning and performance. A field study was conducted via multi-methods including observation, interviews, and survey at a global company running discussion forums spanning internal virtual communities. The unit of analysis was at the discussion thread level. 190 discussion threads comprising 1,200 participants and associated outcomes (rated by their respective advice seekers) were analyzed. Findings suggest that, for the seeker to realize the performance potential of diverse inputs, discussion participants should facilitate the seeker’s learning by engaging in collective elaboration—articulating the differences and relevance of their diverse inputs. The seeker learned and performed the least when discussion participants were highly diverse but did not engage in collective elaboration. Discussion participants engaged in collective elaboration to the extent that they had previously established shared syntactic and semantic understanding of each other’s expertise domains through participation in each other’s communities. This dissertation contributes to the virtual communities literature by unearthing the relationships between expertise diversity and the advice seeker’s learning and performance and explaining when and how the seeker benefits from the diverse knowledge shared through an electronic advice network. The moderating role of collective elaboration explains why prior research may have found no or even a negative relationship between expertise diversity and discussion outcomes. It also contributes to the team literature by offering boundary conditions for the previous findings on expertise diversity and common ground. The collective elaboration construct can be also adopted by team diversity researchers to better understand where a disruption in the chain of group-level information processing may occur in some diverse teams. / text

The purpose of this survey is to describe how selected United States Government agencies provide information to the public via Internet services. With more than 2,000 Federal library and information centers located throughout the world this effort, of necessity, is selective and findings neither represent all libraries nor do they identify all approaches currently used to present information via the Web. An effort has been made to describe services without attributing values to particular site characteristics. This report provides a brief snapshot in time of a complex and rapidly evolving world. While not definitive in scope, it is hoped that this report will provide a baseline for anyone who may wish to revisit some of these sites in the future to determine how services may have been expanded, reduced, or refined.

American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) 2007 Annual Meeting / Position Paper

Sonnenwaldâ s evolving framework for human information behavior (1999) was systematically applied to a set of online community literature to examine whether the frameworkâ s propositions are supported or not, so as to uncover open problems for socio-technical studies of online communities and human information behaviorâ what aspects that are relevant to understanding the reciprocal relationships between technologically-mediated systems, communities and information resources should social informatics be examining, but hasnâ t? Findings are presented.

Inmersos de lleno en la Sociedad del conocimiento, la incorporación de las Tecnologías de la Información y la Comunicación en los procesos de enseñanza y aprendizaje suponen un gran reto a alcanzar por parte tanto de instituciones educativas, como de un profesorado todavía poco formado y menos consciente de los cambios metodológicos a los que se enfrenta.En el marco de la formación del profesorado,la formación a lo largo de la vida se establece como prioridad en los programas educativos y de formación de la agenda europea (2007-2013) y a nuestro entender, ésta puede ser claramente ejemplificada por la creación de comunidades virtuales de aprendizaje en las que individuos con objetivos similares se unen para alcanzar retos en común. El uso de herramientas tecnológicas y de modalidades de formación basadas en entornos virtuales ayudan a la comunidad a generar e intercambiar conocimiento en un entorno en el que se participa de forma colaborativa, se comparten experiencias y se solucionan problemas, produciendo procesos de formación y aprendizaje continuos y en constante evolución.Tomando estas y otras reflexiones como punto de partida se originó la tesis doctoral que presentamos. Así pues, nos propusimos, en primer lugar, realizar un análisis de la situación actual de dicho profesorado en el uso de las tecnologías de la información y la comunicación. El primer gran bloque de esta tesis -o marco teórico y referencial- lo constituyen apartados tales como los grandes cambios metodológicos surgidos a raíz de la incorporación de las TIC y su impacto en la enseñanza y aprendizaje de la lengua inglesa. Seguidamente se realiza un exhaustivo y detallado análisis de los órganos que ofrecen formación al profesorado y a la oferta formativa en TIC dirigida específicamente al colectivo mencionado. Posteriormente se lleva a cabo una compilación de herramientas, recursos y actividades electrónicas dirigidas específicamente al profesorado de inglés teniendo muy en cuenta el ámbito pedagógico y su implantación en el aula, proponiendo pautas didácticas de fácil integración.El segundo gran bloque de la tesis lo constituye una investigación llevada a cabo durante tres años para obtener datos fehacientes respecto del conocimiento en TIC que posee dicho profesorado, la detección de sus demandas formativas reales, la situación actual de este colectivo en relación al acceso e infraestructuras tecnológicas y posibles barreras tanto metodológicas como actitudinales. Así pues se desarrolló una investigación tomando como muestra profesores tanto de educación primaria como de secundaria de todo Catalunya. Dicha investigación fue llevada a a cabo entre los participantes de ocho cursos de formación TIC para profesorado de inglés y para ello se utilizó la modalidad formativa semi-presencial. Para dar soporte a la formación a distancia se utilizaron dos plataformas diferentes: BSCW y Moodle que fomentaron la comunicación y la colaboración entre los participantes hasta límites insospechados.Los resultados obtenidos permitieron observar una realidad muy alejada de los parámetros que deberían ser considerados normales por lo que respecta al grado de formación TIC que tienen el profesorado de inglés. Por otra parte, el feedback recibido tras la realización de los diferentes cursos de formación también nos permitió realizar una propuesta de Plan de Acción formativo con el principal objetivo de capacitar al profesorado de inglés en el uso de las TIC. Así pues, se ofrece una propuesta formativa con los diferentes módulos y contenidos que, a nuestro entender, debería conocer y gestionar dicho profesorado. Finalmente, una de las revelaciones de todo el proceso fue la gestación y consolidación de una comunidad virtual de aprendizaje formada por los profesores participantes en el proceso de formación. / Deeply immersed in the Society of knowledge, the integration of ICT in teaching and learning processes suppose a great challenge to be achieved both by competent institutions and by a collective of teachers, which is still far from being well-trained and not conscious of the methodological trenes and changes to which they are confronted.Within the framework of teacher training, life-long training is established as a priority in the European agenda (2007-2013) and, according to our opinión this can be exempolified by the creation of virtual learning communities in which individuals with similar objectives unite in order to achieve common goals. The use of technological tools and training modalities help the community to generate and exchange knowledge in an environment in which oparticipation is done collaborately, experiences are shared and problems are solved, producing, thus, continuous processes of learning and training, which are in constant evolution.Taking these and other reflexions as departing point this thesis was originated. We carried in the first place a detailed analysis of the present situation of English as a foreign language teachers in the use of ICT. This first great section of this thesis orreferential and theoretical basis- is conformed by chapters which deal with the great methodological changes emerged out of the integartion of ICT and their impact in the teaching and learning of foreign languages. Followingly, there is an exhaustive analysis of the different organizations which offer teacher training in ICT , especially regarding the collective mentioned. Secondly there is a compilation of tools, resources and e.activities especifically addressed to the English as a foreign language teachers, taking into account the pedagogical field as well as its integration into the classrooms.The second main section of this thesis is conformed by an investigation which was carried out during three years in order to obtain relevant data regarding the knowledge of ICT that teachers have, the detection of their training needs and the real situation of this collective regarding their access to technology and the barriers that prevent them form using ICT.Tus, we Developer an investigation which took as sample teachers belonging to both Primary and Secondary Education from the whole of the catalan territory. The research was carried out with participants of eight courses of teacher training in ICT and used the blended modality. In order to support the virtual teaching we used two different platforms: BSCW and Moodle, which encouraged communication among participants and enhanced collaboration as well.The obtained results allowed us to observe that there are many challenges to be overcome. Otherwise, the feedback obtained after the courses were delivered allowed us to account for a Training Action Plan whose main aim is that of providing training and capacitation to teachers of English as foreign language teachers.

This thesis examines the construct of Psychological Sense of Community (PSOC). Within the discipline of community psychology, there is debate as to the dimensions underlying the construct PSOC. One of the few theoretically proposed structures is that put forward by McMillan and Chavis (1986), who hypothesized four dimensions: Belonging; Fulfilment of Needs; Influence; and Shared Connections underlying PSOC. Further, there is some deliberation in the literature as to the existence of PSOC in relational, as well as geographical, communities. Discussion has also emerged regarding the role of social identification within PSOC. It has been suggested that differences in PSOC may be understood in terms of the degree to which members identify with their community (Fisher & Sonn, 1999). However, few studies have explored the place of identification in PSOC. In addition, while PSOC has been applied to both relational and geographical communities, little research has looked in depth at PSOC within relational communities. Thus, the principle aims of the current program of research were to elucidate the underlying dimensions of PSOC and their consistency across geographical and relational communities. Further, the research also aimed to explore the role of identification in PSOC. The first stage of this research endeavoured to clarify the underlying dimensions of PSOC by utilising a questionnaire which included multiple measures of PSOC and social identification, administered to both relational and geographical community members. The first paper of the current research explored PSOC in a relational community, science fiction fandom (N = 359) and the third paper in a sample of residents of rural, regional and urban geographical communities (N = 669). In both the relational and geographical communities, support emerged for McMillan and Chavis' (1986) four dimensions of PSOC. In regards to identification, the Sense of Community iv affective and ingroups ties aspects of social identification were subsumed within the PSOC dimensions; however, the Conscious Identification aspect emerged as separate to the existing PSOC dimensions. The study presented in paper three also examined the role of demographic factors in predicting PSOC in geographical communities. The demographic factors significantly associated with PSOC were: type of region, with rural participants displaying higher PSOC than their urban counterparts; participation in local organizations; having children; and a vision of one's neighbourhood as broader than just a street or block. To date, little research has compared a single group's PSOC with a relational community to their PSOC with their geographical communities. The second paper presented in this manuscript explored PSOC with participants' relational and geographical communities in the sample of members of science fiction fandom (N = 359). All the PSOC dimensions and Conscious Identification emerged as significant predictors of overall sense of community in both community types. Participants reported higher levels of global PSOC with fandom than with their geographical communities, a pattern that also emerged across the four dimensions and Conscious Identification. It was proposed that the degree of choice of community membership may be one reason for this finding. However, stronger conclusions could not be drawn from this study as situational salience may have influenced the results as data was collected in the relational community context. The second phase of the current research aimed to validate the multidimensional nature and related measures of both social identification and PSOC. The fourth paper presented in this thesis examined the construct validity of the three-factor model of social identification as measured by the Three Dimensional Strength of Identification Scale proposed by Cameron (1999, 2004). The 12 item version of the scale was used to collect data from an undergraduate sample (N = 219) to assess their social identification across three distinct group memberships (sex, student and interest group). This data was subjected to confirmatory factor analysis to examine the fit of the three-factor model of social identity in comparison to fit indices for one and two-factor models. The results indicate that the three-factor model was the most parsimonious and best fit to the data across all groups. In addition, the fact that different patterns of means and correlations emerged across groups on the three dimensions provided further evidence for a multidimensional model of social identification and, moreover, the greater depth of exploration it allows. The fifth paper examines The Sense of Community Index (SCI), one of the most commonly used measures of PSOC. There is much discussion in the literature as to the validity of the scale as a measure not only of overall PSOC, but of the dimensions (Membership, Influence, Needs fulfillment and Emotional Connection) theorized by McMillan and Chavis (1986) to underlie the construct. This paper examines the factor structure of the Sense of Community Index in a study (N = 219)that examined neighborhood, student and interest group communities. The results showed that the Sense of Community Index, in terms of its original factor structure, did not adequately fit the data. The scale was revised, utilizing confirmatory factor analysis indicators, to produce a new four-factor structure based on the original items. This revised model was tested and found to display adequate fit indices to the data in all three community types. The results of the study provide empirical support for retaining measures that encapsulate the four dimensions of PSOC.The sixth paper further explores the interplay between PSOC and the dimensions of social identification. In particular, the study (N = 219) examines the relative strength of the separate aspects of social identification (based on Cameron's 2004, Three Factor Model of Social Identification) as predictors of overall PSOC, accounting for situational salience. Results indicate that Ingroup Ties is consistently the strongest predictor of PSOC and that the strength of Ingroup Affect and Centrality alter according to the group or community context. The seventh and final paper from the current research program emerged from the results of paper two indicating that choice may influence individuals' social identification and PSOC with their respective communities. The study presented in this paper examined participants' (N = 219) level of social identification and PSOC across multiple group memberships that differ in the degree of choice associated with membership (low choice: neighborhood community; medium choice: student community; and high choice: self chosen interest group). Results indicated that, controlling for contextual salience, choice was positively associated with levels of social identification and PSOC. Overall, the current program of research provides some important findings which add significantly to the theoretical understanding of PSOC in today's society. The research provides clarification of both the dimensions underlying PSOC, their application to both geographical and relational communities and the measurement of overall PSOC and these dimensions. Further, it provides empirical evidence of the importance of the Centrality aspect of identification in PSOC in both geographical and relational settings. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings of the overall program of research are discussed.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Communication, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 56-61).