Thesis (M.Com. (Business Management))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2010.

This case study examined the spread of ideas in a Gr. 5/6 classroom in which the teacher was attempting to foster a knowledge building community. The goal of the research was to explore the relationship between the social network of the classroom (in terms of face-to-face and computer-mediated interactions), the teacher’s role, and the spread of ideas. Further, the thesis examined how social network tools may help teachers better understand the pedagogical implications of Scardamalia and Bereiter’s (1991) Teacher A, B, C models. Analyses of videotaped lessons revealed the teacher used a complex mix of traditional instructional methods and knowledge building strategies while trying to shift the locus of control of learning to students. Critical teacher-driven processes included the class-wide adoption of knowledge building vocabulary and practices, and efforts to foster higher levels of student-student discourse. Analyses of online interactions provided strong evidence of highly interconnected student-student online networks, with the note reading network being especially dense. Longitudinal studies revealed these network established themselves early in the unit, and persisted during the course of the inquiry. There was evidence that idea improvement was present in addition to idea spread. In face-to-face classroom communication, the teacher’s role was more central, particularly in "Knowledge Building Talk" sessions. However, here too, the teacher made efforts to shift the locus of control. Overall the analyses suggest that social network tools are potentially useful for helping teachers make the difficult transition from "Teacher A" and "Teacher B" strategies, in which the locus of control is with the teacher, to "Teacher C" strategies, in which strategic cognitive processes are turned over to students. This dissertation proposes that movement toward Teacher C practices may be illustrated, in part, by a shift in classroom network topologies from that of a star-shaped network, centered on the teacher, to a highly interconnected student-student network. Finally, the thesis recounts a number of ways in which the use of social network tools uncovered discourse patterns of which the teacher was unaware, including gender differences in reading, building-on, and contribution patterns.

This thesis demonstrates relations among health, social network, ADL and patterns of care in the oldest old guided by a resource theoretical model. The analyzed data are based on two studies: the Nona study, a longitudinal study of 157 individuals aged 86 to 94 years, and the H70 study, a longitudinal study of 964 individuals aged 70 at baseline. Data were collected by interviews and to some extent in the H70 study, medical exams and medical records. The results demonstrate that perceived resources seem to affect patterns of care to a higher extent than the more objective resources in the sample of the oldest old. On the other hand, sociodemographic variables such as gender, marital status and SES, in addition to the more objective resources of having children nearby and the number of symptoms of illness predicted institutionalization during a subsequent 30-year period from the age of 70. The proportion of elderly persons’ institutionalization was further significantly higher than that generally found in cross-sectional studies. ADL was one of the strongest predictors for both use of formal care and institutionalization in both samples, indicating an effective targeting of the formal care system in Sweden. The care at end of life in the oldest old is challenged by the problems with progressive declines in ADL and health, which makes it hard to fit in the dying oldest old in the palliative care system. There is a need to increase the knowledge and the possibility for care staff to support and encourage social network factors and for decision-making staff to consider factors beyond ADL.

Στον ολοένα και αυξανόμενο όγκο πληροφοριών που υπάρχει διαθέσιμος οποιαδήποτε στιγμή στο Διαδίκτυο, ο τρόπος πρόσβασης του χρήστη σε αυτόν γίνεται διαρκώς ευκολότερος. Ο κάθε χρήστης του Διαδικτύου έχει ανά πάσα στιγμή τη δυνατότητα να βρει πληροφορίες συγκεντρωμένες σε έναν χώρο πολύ πιο εύκολα από ότι θα έκανε για παράδειγμα σε μια βιβλιοθήκη. Ενδιαφέρον παρουσιάζει ο τρόπος με τον οποίο ο κάθε χρήστης φτάνει στην εύρεση της πληροφορίας και η ενδεχόμενη ύπαρξη ενός μοντέλου στο οποίο βασίζεται αυτή η συμπεριφορά. Επειδή ο χώρος του Διαδικτύου είναι αχανής και πολύπλευρος, στα πλαίσια της παρούσας διπλωματικής επιλέξαμε να επικεντρωθούμε μόνο στις Σελίδες Κοινωνικής Δικτύωσης (Social Network Sites) και πιο συγκεκριμένα στο Facebook και στο Google+. Η επιλογή των δυο αυτών σελίδων έγινε με κριτήριο την ομοιότητα και των παρεμφερών δυνατοτήτων που προσφέρουν και οι δύο. Επίσης, μας δόθηκε η δυνατότητα να μελετήσουμε τη συμπεριφορά των χρηστών σε έναν χώρο, που για τους περισσότερους ήταν άγνωστος, όπως είναι το Google+, το οποίο μόλις πριν από λίγο καιρό έγινε διαθέσιμο σε όλους τους χρήστες του Διαδικτύου. Έτσι, λοιπόν, σχεδιάσαμε ένα πείραμα στο οποίο οι συμμετέχοντες θα αναλάμβαναν να κάνουν ένα συγκεκριμένο αριθμό παρόμοιων εργασιών τόσο στο Google+ όσο και στο Facebook και χρησιμοποιώντας τον Eye Tracker της Tobii καταγράψαμε τη συμπεριφορά τους. Αξιοποιώντας τις δυνατότητες, τις οποίες μας παρέχει το Tobii Studio, το λογισμικό που συνοδεύει το μηχάνημα, επιχειρήσαμε να αναλύσουμε αυτές τις συμπεριφορές βάσει κάποιων χαρακτηριστικών, που ονομάζονται μετρικές. Επειδή, όμως, το λογισμικό περιορίζεται σε συγκεκριμένα χαρακτηριστικά που υπολογίζει, κρίθηκε αναγκαία η ανάπτυξη μιας μεθόδου με την οποία θα γινόταν η εξαγωγή περαιτέρω χρήσιμων χαρακτηριστικών , ενός είδους εργαλείου σε πολύ αρχικό στάδιο ωστόσο. Τέλος, χρησιμοποιώντας το SPSS κάναμε στατιστική ανάλυση των αποτελεσμάτων τόσο του πειράματος όσο και των συνοδευτικών σε αυτό ερωτηματολογίων για να τα επιβεβαιώσουμε και στατιστικά. / In the constantly increasing mass of information that is available anytime on the Internet, the way each user accesses it becomes easier. Each user of the Internet has at any time the opportunity to find information gathered all in one place a lot easier than he could do in a library for example. The way each user comes to finding that information and the potential existence of a model on which this behavior is based, is of great interest. Due to the fact that the Internet is vast and versatile, in this thesis we decided to focus only on social network sites and more specifically on Facebook and Google+. The choice of these two sites was made based on their resemblance and the similar opportunities they both have to offer. In addition, we were given the chance to study the behavior of users in a site, with which most people were not familiar, like Google+, which has been made available to everyone only a couple of months ago. So we designed an experiment on which the participants would undertake a certain amount of similar tasks both in Google+ and Facebook and using Tobii’s Eye Tracker we recorded their behavior. Utilizing the abilities that Tobii Studio, the software accompanying the Eye Tracker, offers us, we attempted to analyze these behaviors based on some characteristics, known as metrics. However due to the fact that the software is limited only on certain characteristics that it measures, we judged it was necessary to develop a method that would extract some more useful characteristics, like a tool, although in a very early stage. Finally, using SPSS we made a statistical analysis of both the experiment’s and the accompanying questionnaire’s results to confirm them also statistically.

Online communities have become an increasingly popular channel for social interaction, enabling knowledge and opinion sharing across a board range of topics and contexts. Their viability and sustainability depends largely on contributions from community members in terms of time, resources, and knowledge. However, how individuals' knowledge contribution behavior changes over time and what network structural characteristics influence individuals' contribution behavior is not well understood. This study investigates "co-evolution" of social networks (i.e. advice network) and knowledge contribution behavior thorough a lens of social selection and social influence mechanism. This study are particularly interested in examining the dynamics of the advice network ties and the knowledge contribution behavior in the context of virtual financial communities in which people voluntarily participate to exchanges investing-related information. Unlike popular friendship-based online social networks, virtual financial communities in this study enables members to construct their own advice network by adding, maintaining, or terminating advice ties. Changes in network ties are referred to as social selection, while changes in individuals' behavior in response to the current network position are referred to as social influence. Dynamic network modeling is applied to investigate effects of social selection and influence separately and then examine the interplay between social selection and behavioral influence. Examination of such effects both separately and simultaneously requires a longitudinal data that capture dynamic changes in both the advice ties and the behavior under study.

Social network analysis was used in combination with qualitative methods to identify characteristics of stakeholder networks that supported cases of institutional development in rural water sectors in Ghana, Malawi, India, Tajikistan, and Bolivia. Institutions studied included local governments, a national government institution, and community operator committees managing water treatment facilities. Interviews with 162 participants in these countries used a facilitated network drawing exercise to capture data on stakeholder relationships and perceptions of factors supporting institutional development. Quantitative analysis of these networks and qualitative analysis of perceived factors identified three network characteristics as supporting institutional development for rural water supply in multiple countries and types of institutions. The three characteristics are: information and skill ties between an institution and stakeholders at lower levels of sector hierarchy; information and skill ties between an institution and stakeholders at higher levels of sector hierarchy; and coordination between stakeholders at higher levels of sector hierarchy that strongly engage an institution. These three characteristics can be observed from a network perspective, and qualitative descriptions of these interactions can improve understanding of the nuance and benefit of particular network ties. Social network analysis on its own cannot predict whether an institution will develop if these network characteristics exist, but it can be used to identify where network ties are absent or weakly developed. Methods and findings from this research enable a rigorous analysis of complex stakeholder interactions in rural water sectors to identify where particular relationships might be strengthened, and strengthening the environments that support institutional development has the potential to lead to the stronger institutions that are necessary for sustainable rural water service delivery.

abstract: This thesis proposed a novel approach to establish the trust model in a social network scenario based on users' emails. Email is one of the most important social connections nowadays. By analyzing email exchange activities among users, a social network trust model can be established to judge the trust rate between each two users. The whole trust checking process is divided into two steps: local checking and remote checking. Local checking directly contacts the email server to calculate the trust rate based on user's own email communication history. Remote checking is a distributed computing process to get help from user's social network friends and built the trust rate together. The email-based trust model is built upon a cloud computing framework called MobiCloud. Inside MobiCloud, each user occupies a virtual machine which can directly communicate with others. Based on this feature, the distributed trust model is implemented as a combination of local analysis and remote analysis in the cloud. Experiment results show that the trust evaluation model can give accurate trust rate even in a small scale social network which does not have lots of social connections. With this trust model, the security in both social network services and email communication could be improved. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2011

Our focus is on the confluence of social networks and virtual organizations. In massively networked populations, ideologies and aspirations spread at phenomenally fast pace. The Arab spring, for instance, arose in Tunisia on December 17, 2010 and its effects were seen in several countries in a short time. Social action, such as in Tunisia, is often observed as network spikes and bursts that propagate and saturate the network rapidly. There are several organizational models published that explain behavioral dynamics in organizations. However, none of these models have the representational power of modeling spontaneous exigencies of a networked organization that account for rapid rates of dissemination in ad-hoc networks. Therefore, we have conceived this in a life cycle for a prototypical spontaneous, networked organization (SNO) and describe operations therein from formation to dissolution. After describing the life cycle, we offer insights for a model of a successful SNO. Furthermore, we have implemented a spacecraft organization of satellites using Netlogo for further validation of our model.

Social support for people living with HIV in rural America remains a considerably understudied aspect of HIV/AIDS prevention. People living with HIV/AIDS (PLHA) require extensive support in order to remain in care, and reduce their viral suppression, and other disease complications. Without support, the likelihood that PLHA will refrain from or drop out of treatment options is gravely heightened, which consequently poses a significant threat for efforts to eliminate HIV as a public health issue. Using a mixed-method approach to Social Network Analysis, this study examines the principal role that social support plays in a person’s likelihood to adhere to care and consequently, attain viral suppression. Specifically, it looks at the roles of the family, friends, partners/spouses, and healthcare providers. The study also explores how social relations serve as mediators to stigma and discrimination, especially for disproportionate groups. Closely linked to social support availability is the perceived level of significance of the type of support that is available to the subjects. The study therefore goes further to explore the subjects’ perception of the support they receive (emotional, informational, and instrumental) and their satisfaction with it. This is imperative in that it sheds light on the role that the subjects’ social relations plays in their retention in care. This research again takes an interdisciplinary approach by exploring the contribution of both communication and health communication strategies to effect behavioral change. It contributes to research on HIV/AIDS health equity, and infectious disease management. It also contributes to efforts to identify strategies to control the spread of HIV by proposing efficient ways to optimize social support through the stages of the Care Continuum and consequently, facilitate an increase in the number of people who attain viral suppression. Keywords: Social Network Analysis; Social Support; Rural HIV; PLHA; Stigma.

As the Internet has grown to represent arguably the largest “engineered” system on earth, network researchers have shown increasing interest in measuring this large-scale networked system. In the process, structures such as the physical Internet or the many different (logical) overlay networks that this physical infrastructure enables have been the focus of numerous studies. Many of these studies have been fueled by the ease of access to “big data”. Moreover, they benefited from advances in the study of complex networks. However, an important missing aspect in typical applications of complex network theory to the study of real-world distributed systems has been a general lack of attention to domain knowledge. On the one hand, missing or superficial domain knowledge can negatively affect the studies “input”; that is, limitations or idiosyncrasies of the measurement methods can render the resulting graphs difficult to interpret if not meaningless. On the other hand, lacking or insufficient domain knowledge can result in specious “output”; that is, popular graph abstractions of real-world systems are incapable of accounting for “details” that are important from an engineering perspective. In this thesis, we take a closer look at measurement-based characterization of a few real-world large-scale networked systems and focus on the role that domain knowledge plays in gaining a thorough understanding of these systems key properties and behavior. More specifically, we use domain knowledge to (i) design context-aware measurement strategies that capture the relevant information about the system of interest, (ii) analyze the captured view of the networked system baring in mind the abstraction imposed by the chosen graph representation, and (iii) scrutinize the results derived from the analysis of the graph-based representations by investigating the root causes underlying these findings. The main technical contribution of our work is twofolds. First, we establish concrete connections between the amount and level of domain knowledge needed and the quality of the measurements collected from networked systems. Second, we also provide concrete evidence for the role that domain knowledge plays in the analysis of views inferred from measurements collected from large-scale networked systems