A blog, a shortened form of weblog, is a website where an author shares thoughts in posts or entries. Most blogs permit readers to add comments to posts and thereby be a conversational mechanism. One way that companies have started to use blogs is to monitor their corporate image (in this dissertation, the term image is used in reference to corporate, brand and/or product image). This study focuses on how common socio-psychological processes mediate consumers’ revelation of corporate image in the blogosphere. Centering resonance analysis, a means of measuring similarity between two bodies of text, is used in conjunction with multidimensional scaling to locate text as cognitive objects in a space. Clusters are then detected and measured to quantify diversity in the thoughts expressed. Detected patterns are studied from a social process theory perspective, where complex phenomena are hypothesized to be the result of the interaction of simpler processes. A majority of blog commenters compromise the expression of their thoughts to gain social acceptance. This study identifies the most extreme of such people so companies who monitor blogs can assign less weight to image indications gained from them as they may be merely expressing thoughts that are intended to maintain social acceptance. It was also found that single-theme blogs attract a readership with similarly narrow interests. The boldest and most diverse thinkers among comment writers have the most impact because of their ability to provoke the thinking of others. However, commenters who repeat the same ideas have little effect, suggesting that introducing shills is unlikely to shift the sentiment of a blog’s readership. People participate in blog communities for reasons (e.g., need for community) that may undermine thought diversity. However, there may be value in serving those needs even though no valuable insights are provided into image or directions for product development. Members of homogeneous-thinking communities were observed to more actively participate, with greater longevity. This may increase loyalty to the company hosting the blog.

The internet marketing is a common tool for performing arts administrators to use today. However, there are still many things to improve since the environment, technologies and internet resources are changing quickly. To comprehend the variations and problems of internet marketing that performing arts companies may face in the future, the researcher studies the network environment, communication and its applications. The purposes of this study include understanding how performance companies utilize internet marketing, blog marketing and their influences. The primary cases of this thesis were selected from the lists of 2002-2006 ¡§The Support Plan for the Development of Performing Arts Groups¡¨ of The Council for Cultural Affairs. The data was collected through observations and in-depth interviews. This study shows that the most beneficial outcomes of internet marketing are ¡§brand management¡¨ and ¡§market expansion.¡¨ In the present circumstance, shortage of manpower and budget, search for external resources, and development of customers are still the major problems in performing arts marketing. On the other hand, by using blog marketing can greatly improve the performance companies¡¦ ¡§brand image,¡¨ ¡§media exposure,¡¨ and ¡§customer communication.¡¨ Most of study cases consider that the benefits of blog marketing are accumulated from many internet marketing tools. It is impossible to evaluate single factor of blog. Furthermore, the investment on blog marketing are limited, thus only a few cases can develop special promotion plans through blog marketing. Without certain statistic approval, most of performance companies can only adjust their blog marketing strategies by doing. This study suggests that performing arts companies should take advantage of the cyber communities. They can let audience share the internet space by offering them chances to participation openly. Secondly, they can combine with virtual or physical events to create viral and word-of-mouth marketing effects, and to expand the segmental community promotion through internet opinion leaders. Thirdly, the companies can use ¡§keyword search engine¡¨ and ¡§differential marketing¡¨ to create diversities among performing arts blogs. The study also makes four suggestions for blog service providers: customization threshold, cluster effect, performing arts blog portal, and sponsorship, and hope to encourage the cooperation between them and the performing arts groups.

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Techn. Fachhochschule, Diplomarbeit--Zugl.: Berlin, 2006. / Lt. Vorwort basiert dieses Buch auf der Diplomarbeit der beiden Autoren, als überarbeitete und aktual. Fassung.

Since the introduction of e-learning in Tanzania‘s higher education institutions, student learning outcomes expected on the basis of previous studies on the capability of e-learning from around the world have not been achieved. This study investigates e-learning designs currently implemented at a Tanzanian university, and then designed and tested three e-learning designs. Study 1 randomly selected four e-learning courses, examined the course designs in Moodle, observed instructors, surveyed students about their experiences, and interviewed instructors and technical staff involved in running the courses. Research questions were: What is the nature of e-learning designs created by Tanzanian university instructors‘ in their existing practices? To what extent do the existing e-learning designs produce student interactions and engagement? Study 2 used the most typical design observed in Study 1 as a control, and included two designs intended to promote student interactions and engagement with content. One design added discussion forums, and the second discussion forums and podcasts. Research questions were: To what extent do the three designed e-learning environments and pedagogical approaches enhance student interaction and learning engagement? Do the designs of e-learning environments and pedagogical approaches improve learning and higher-order thinking? 102 B.Sc. with Education students were randomly assigned to three tutorial groups taught by the same instructor. To establish a baseline, all students first studied using the control design for one instructional unit, and then one group continued for three units. The process of designing, implementation, and evaluation was used to improve each design and associated practices. All qualitative data were analysed in Atlas-ti and quantitative results using SPSS version 16. Moreover, social network analysis was used to characterize interaction patterns. The study had three main findings. First, before the introduction of the novel designs, students had few opportunities to interact and learned content posted by the instructor in isolation. Second, guided by social constructivist and activity theories, students participated in discussion forums improved social interaction over the three iterations. They advanced from isolative learning to collaborative learning. Social interactions and engagement were amplified when podcasts were used. These advances were gradual and differed between groups, depending on changes in instructor pedagogical strategies. Third, students improved their academic achievement and cognitive thinking progressively over the three iterations. They changed from memorizing facts before intervention to meaningful learning where learners explored and integrated ideas into coherent meaning. Advances were modest when discussion forum alone was used, but were extensive when podcasts were added. The acts of student to bring what they have learned from podcasts to the learning community contributed to such improvement. The study concludes that the use of discussion forums grounded on social constructivist pedagogies may provide significant student interactions, engagement and enhanced academic achievement. Coupling podcasts with discussion forums may be a powerful way to enhance social interactivity, higher-order thinking and academic achievements. In addition, the process of implementing constructivist pedagogy resulted in instructor learning. The more the instructor engaged in design team meetings, the more he becomes able to design complex pedagogies based on social constructivist theory. / published_or_final_version / Education / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Ett hjälpmedel för företag som är under mycket diskussion just nu är så kallade "Web 2.0"-verktyg. Det är en teknologi som har sina rötter i sociala medier som exempelvis Wikis och bloggar. Tetra Pak är ett stort svenskt företag som är under inledningsfasen av sin implementering av teknologin. Tack vare information som givits från anställda på Tetra Pak gavs deras bild av Web 2.0 och hur deras strategier för implementeringen såg ut. Den här uppsatsens syfte är att ta reda på vilka de viktigaste faktorerna är som stora företag behöver vid implementeringen av Web 2.0 för att personalen skall anamma teknologin. Nyttan och problemen med Web 2.0 är många men grundar sig i hanteringen av kunskap inom en organisation. Implementeringen av denna teknologi är naturligtvis en stor förändring för ett stort företag. Uppsatsens information hämtades via intervjuer med två personer som arbetar med Web 2.0 för Tetra Pak. Intervjuerna genomfördes över telefon och det visade sig att de hade väldigt god kunskap om ämnet. Insyn kring den nuvarande situationen på Tetra Pak, vilka barriärer som stod i vägen för implementeringen och vad Tetra Pak har för strategier för implementeringen av Web 2.0 tillhör det empiriska underlaget. Det visade sig att Tetra Pak hade en förändrad implementeringsstrategi som först fokuserade på organisationens och de anställdas behov och sedan på den faktiska implementeringen av Web 2.0. Författarna kommer fram till att personalens engagemang är vitalt för att lyckas och att deras engagemang vinns genom att erbjuda personalen ett mervärde hos Web 2.0-verktygen som ersätter delar av deras nuvarande arbetsrutiner. Även ett öppet klimat där alla kan ha utbyte av varandra, visade sig vara en viktig faktor då syftet med Web 2.0 är just sociala interaktioner.

University science education has been undergoing great amount of change since the commercialization of Internet a decade ago. Mobile technologies in science education can encompass more than the proximal teaching and learning environment. Podcasting, for example, allows audio content from user-selected feeds to be automatically downloaded to one’s computer as it becomes available online, and then later transferred to a portable player for user’s consumption at a convenient time and place. Enjoying a phenomenal growth in mainstream society, podcasting are asynchronous and could be provided at a distance from a classroom. This paper reports a case study from the University of British Columbia that implemented podcasting for physics content. It presents the rationale for, technical details and step-by-step guide to creating podcasts in the sciences.

Många av de mest populära webbtjänsterna på internet idag bygger på ett användargenererat innehåll, stora aktörer såsom FaceBook, Instagram, YouTube, reseapplikationer, diverse bloggportaler och wiki-sidor vore inget utan sina användare. Tidigare forskning visar dock att det bara är en liten del av användarna som faktiskt är aktiva bidragare, majoriteten av besökarna är mer intresserade av att läsa vad andra skriver istället för att själva bidra. Detta anser författarna vara ett problem då onlinerecensioner blir felrepresenterade genom att det bara är en liten procent av besökarna som faktiskt bidrar med sin åsikt. Studien undersöker användarnas beteende och behov både kvalitativt och kvantitativt genom en enkätundersökning och sex intervjuer. Fallstudien avser att ta reda på sambandet mellan användbarhet och motivation med fokus på bidragandet bland användarna. Utifrån litteraturstudier kring användbarhet och motivation presenterar författarna sin egen modell för motivationsskapande faktorer vid gränssnittsdesign. Data från enkätundersökning och intervjuer har resulterat i personas som i samband med heuristiska undersökningen, på befintliga gränssnitt som nyttjar användargenererat innehåll, legat grund för utvecklandet av prototyper. För att besvara forskningsfrågan har författarna tagit fram faktorer för motivationsskapande som tillgodoser olika psykologiska behov, dessa behov påverkar i sin tur en människas motivation.

As our society merges with the digital, new issues of community, collaboration and knowledge production have risen to the forefront of the social sciences in a quest to explore what this means at both the macro and micro level. Collaborative knowledge production is the process of a large group of individuals joining forces to co-create tangible pieces of information. It only functions when a critical mass of individuals get together to co-create the resource. As these actions are unpaid, voluntary work, the challenge is to motivate individuals to donate their own resources (such as time and expertise) to the project.   This paper examines the motivations behind such actions, and whether or not a community is inevitably constructed by such actions, indeed whether or not community is even theoretically possible in the online sphere.  wikiHow.com, a popular collaborative website, was used as an in-depth case-study in my research. I chose a qualitative approach, distributing both open and closed questionnaires to participants on the wikiHow website through both snowball and convenience sampling methods. The theoretical discussion and analysis draws apon work from Wellman, Putnam, Levy, Lessig, Benkler and Maslow, among others prominent in the field.  Participants revealed they were driven to contibute by numerous, interlinked motivations, linked primarily by the high level of importance they placed on social activities. This study provides novel evidence that wikiHow users are multifaceted entities, driven by a large range of factors with a strong emphasis on seeking out and participating in social interaction. This leads us to label wikiHow as a definitively modern community and allows us to conclude that community has not disappeared, rather it has evolved and adapted to include emergent digital possibilities.

In my paper I adress the question of what happens in the relationship between the beholder, the artwork and the artist when they meet in the era of Web 2.0. The new smartphone based medium that I write about is Instagram. The artist i write about is the Swedish illustrator Jesper Waldersten. My purpose with this paper was to explore how the the beholder, pictures and artist relate to one another i relation to Instagram and how the interface of the smartphone and the app affect the beholder in these relationships. I also seek out to understand the difference between how Instagrams interface affect the beholder in comparison to the interface of the artists web page and his book. I use the method of qualitative empiricism to study Walderstens account. I do this study by counting number of pictures, comments, changes, descriptions and overall alterations over a set period of time. What I found out is that Instagram without a doubt is an important cornerstone of our Web 2.0 participatory-culture and that it have created a space in which we can behold art in a new kind of way. This is partly thanks to how the interface affects the picture and the beholder, but most of all because of how the different Instagram users affect each other.