INVESTIGATING THE ASSOCIATIONS BETWEEN CREDIBILITY ASSESSMENTS AND INFORMATION USE TASKS WITH RESPECT TO DOCUMENT GENRES IN THE CONTEXT OF UNIVERSITY TEACHING

Higher education requires intense information practices for knowledge diffusion, application, and innovation. Faculty assess and use a variety of documents when they teach their students. They make complex credibility assessments, and they use information with varying degrees of perceived credibility to achieve their teaching goals. Unfortunately, existing credibility research often stops once documents are selected. Our knowledge of the associations between credibility assessments and information use remains limited. Additionally, scholars agree professional tasks are associated with the genres of the documents used to accomplish these tasks. For example, instructional genres – including tutorials and lesson plans – are particularly useful to tasks related to educational pursuits. Despite the potential benefits that the identification of genres might provide in searching, navigation, and comprehension of information, researchers rarely exploit it to facilitate faculty’s document assessments and information use in support of their teaching. To solve the above problems, this study aimed at uncovering the associations between credibility assessments and information use tasks with respect to document genres in the context of university teaching. Specifically, it investigated whether there were associations: (1) between the criteria faculty employed to assess the credibility of the documents they used to support their teaching and the genres of these documents; (2) between the credibility criteria they employed to assess and the information use tasks they performed to use these documents; and (3) between the genres of these documents and the information use tasks they performed. Understanding the above associations could enhance our knowledge of the roles of document genres in making credibility assessments and information use decisions in the context of university teaching. This study took a mixed-method, bottom-up approach to uncovering the above associations. It first employed qualitative citation analysis to identify the genres of the documents faculty used in their courses based on the citations in their teaching materials (e.g., syllabi, lecture slides, lab notes, and links to resources). Customized genre repertoires that detailed the contexts in which different genres were used in Excel format were created. Semi-structured interviews were then implemented to collect data about the courses included in this study, the general criteria faculty employed to select documents for their courses, the tasks they performed to use the information in the genres this study selected for in-depth interviews, and the criteria they employed to assess the selected genres. Interviews were fully transcribed for qualitative content analysis. The results of this study indicate the criteria faculty employed served as function enablers that bridged the selected genres and the information use tasks they performed to use these genres. Credibility was one of the function enablers that enabled faculty to use the selected genres to perform different tasks. It played different roles in different tasks. It played a leading role in teaching tasks that developed students’ advanced learning skills and helped students to continue their learning. It also played a leading role in information use tasks that involved subject experts, professional orginations, and diverse genres originated from heterogeneous sources. The results also indicate the information use tasks faculty performed served as inclusion and exclusion criteria for genres. The information use tasks determined the information characteristics of genres that mattered in faculty’s task performance. This study shed new light on existing knowledge about genre-task associations by: (1) Exploring these associations in the context of university teaching; (2) Explicating these associations through the perception of credibility; and (3) Adding the criterion-genre and criterion-task associations to complement these associations. This study also enhanced our understanding of credibility in the context of university teaching. Finally, this study made several methodological contributions, including: (1) Transforming citation analysis from bibliographic records to research tools that engaged participants and ensured the accuracy of data; (2) Transforming citation analysis from bibliographic records to customized genre repertoires that preserved the contexts of information use; and (3) Developing rules to consistently select genres for investigating task-genre associations across disciplinary boundaries

Understanding The Use and Impact of Social Media Features on The Educational Experiences of Higher-Education Students in Blended and Distance-Learning Environments

Students are increasingly expecting social media to be a component of their educational experiences both outside and inside of the classroom. The phenomenon of interest in this dissertation is understanding how the educational experiences of students are affected when social media are incorporated into online and blended course activities. Qualitative case studies are undertaken toward this end from a Human-Computer Interaction perspective by proposing 4 research questions: (1) How does the use of social media in blended-learning courses impact students\u27 educational experience? (2) How does the use of social media in online courses impact students\u27 educational experience? (3) How do specific features of social media impact student experiences inside the physical classroom? (4) How do specific features of social media impact student experiences outside of the physical classroom? This work is rooted in the theoretical foundations of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework to conceptualize educational experience as defined by the intersection of social, cognitive, and teaching presences. Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) is also integrated here to conceptualize social media features as technical objects defined through the relationship of functional affordances and symbolic expressions between students and social media. The findings are based on a total of 9 case studies (5 within a blended context and 4 within an online context) bound by students in Masters-level library science classes at Syracuse University. The results suggest that social presence is clearly the most salient type of presence in social media within blended course contexts, while cognitive and social presences are relatively salient in social media within online course contexts. Two main categories of affordances, timeliness and information curation, emerged as pertinent to students\u27 educational experiences in blended courses; while both of these, plus multimedia engagement, were identified as relevant to online courses. Technical objects (general features of social media) were identified which facilitate these affordances, and implications based on these are provided in respect to practice (for educators and information technology designers) and theory