Exploring leadership in Facebook communities: personality traits and activities

Leaders of online communities are today becoming key players in social media sites like Facebook. Responsible for the community\u27s participation rules, limits and members’ identities, these leaders represent an important population on which to focus. This paper compares 94 Facebook community leaders to 94 other Internet users (N=188) in order to identify differences among them with respect to five major personality traits ( the BIG 5 ) as well as their online and offline activities. The results of the online surveys show that Facebook community leaders are more extroverted, open to experience, emotionally stable and active online and offline than are other Internet users. Examining the community categories, the leaders who manage Facebook support communities were found to be more introverted and less active online than leaders of other community types. The results are discussed in the context of the unique role of online leadership in the social media environment

Doctor of Philosophy

dissertationThe effective use of technology is increasingly important in many fields where online and digital communication, collaboration, and production have become more prevalent. Although it is clear that many higher education students come into the classroom with skills involved with consuming technology, they often are much less capable of producing technology, such as editing videos or creating websites. Recently, many K-12 and higher education institutions have been redesigning instructional methods to better meet the needs of students in today's work environment through teaching collaborative, authentic technology tasks. Relatively few studies have examined the role of student communication practices in technology classrooms that involve collaboration and authentic tasks, so this dissertation describes a multiple-semester, comparative case study of student communication patterns and themes. Operating as an engaged observer, I monitored an advanced Web design course during three semesters to better understand how students' communication practice influence their collaboration on authentic tasks. Through participant observation, in-depth interviews, gathering student documents, and transcription of group talk, I was able to use Situated Learning theory to examine the way students talk about their activities and proceed through a 16-week learning period. An inductive analysis revealed several discursive patterns and practices including how using technology influenced their communication practices and their development (or not) as a community of practice. These patterns are also discussed in light of their enabling and constraining qualities and the extent to which they echo discourses within other technology classrooms. Particular focus is given to the development and process of student learning teams, categorized into stages, from Individualism, Coalescing, Maturing and Identity formation, to Production and Transformation. Finally, Situated Learning theory's and small group communication's notions of discourse is extended within the technical sphere, as students both use and create new technologies, to become Community of Practice Development theory (CPDT)

The Role of Pharmacist in the Health Care System: Current Scenario in India

Pharmacists are society's specialists on drugs. The Pharmacist of today is a drug-maker, drug-dispenser, drug-custodian, patient-counselor, drug-researcher, and drug-educator and above all an honest and patriotic citizen. The techno-proficient foundation of the drug expert gives him/her the certainty of providing services with a moral way to deal with the satisfaction of patients. The consecrated qualities are required to be cherished and professed by the pharmacist. Pharmacists assume a significant job in giving health care services, benefits by means of community pharmacy services in rural areas where physicians are not accessible or where physician services are unreasonably expensive for meeting the health care necessities. The paper at that point recognizes how pharmacists give expanded services, identifies key challenges and barriers, and suggests rules and regulations that could help secure open doors for pharmacists to play out an extended job

Sustainable Participation? Mapping out and reflecting on the field of public dialogue on science and technology

The field of public participation in issues relating to science, technology and the environment is booming. To date much effort has gone into developing new participatory approaches and their evaluation, while most of what we know comes from individual case studies of engagement. This report builds on one of the first ever studies of public participation experts, their networks, roles and relations, to present a broader analysis of the UK public dialogue field as a whole. It draws on a recent project that involved 21 of the UK’s leading thinkers, practitioners, and policy makers in this area reflecting on the following critical questions. • What is the nature of participatory governance networks and the roles and relations of different actors within them? • Who counts as an expert on public participation and how are these meanings changing over time? • What are the implications of increasing institutionalisation, commercialisation and professionalisation of public dialogue? • To what extent are UK science and policy institutions learning about and learning from public dialogue? Taken together, these insights indicate that the field of public dialogue on science and technology has reached a critical moment and highlight a series of challenges and recommendations for its future sustainability

Social Work Students Managing Emotions: An Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis Utilising Poetry and Prose as an Autoethnographic Turn

This thesis reports on research exploring how student social workers experience, express and manage the emotional content of practice learning in a relational context. It considers how social/supervisory support promotes emotional management for student social workers. Student respondents reflect on a variety of placement experiences ranging from a third-sector advice centre; a service supporting people who are homeless; local authority child protection services; a hospital discharge team and statutory adult mental health teams. Their responses reveal organisational interventions with a wide range of people from children and families to adults engaging with health and social care services. New knowledge is produced through an identification of unpaid emotional labour as well as how discretion informs developing professionalism within managerialist organisations. There is limited current research or theory illustrating how social workers manage emotions within organisations and even less concerned with how emotions are experienced in generic social work, or which consider emotions from a student social worker perspective in order to develop educational theory. This is the premise of my research. An autoethnographic approach evolves during the life of the research, part of the iterative process on which the premise of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) is founded. This facilitates the presentation of my own lived experience as part of the research, thus confirming my place as both researcher and researched. My sense-making leads to co-creation whereby student respondents’ voices are illuminated either directly through I-poems utilising interview excerpts, or through my own poetic/prose responses to the event of data gathering and subsequent analysis. The oscillation between my experience and that of student respondents aims to achieve authenticity and enable performative research as a means of fostering the third hermeneutic of Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). This methodological development contributes to new knowledge in the field of qualitative research

Cluster Analysis in Online Learning Communities: A Text Mining Approach

This paper presents a theory-informed blueprint for mining unstructured text data using mixed- and multi-methods to improve understanding of collaboration in asynchronous online discussions (AOD). Grounded in a community of inquiry theoretical framework to systematically combine established research techniques, we investigated how AOD topics and individual reflections on those topics affect formation of clusters or groups in a community. The data for the investigation came from 54 participants and 470 messages. Data analysis combined the analytical efficiency and scalability of topic modeling, social network analysis, and cluster analysis with qualitative content analysis. The cluster analysis found three clusters and that members of the intermediate cluster (i.e., middle of three clusters) played a pivotal role in this community by expressing uncertainty statements, which facilitated a collective sense-making process to resolve misunderstandings. Furthermore, we found that participants’ selected discussion topics and how they discussed those topics influenced cluster formations. Theoretical, practical, and methodological implications are discussed in depth

Emergent Educational Practice in Community Settings

My study examines the processes and practices of community teaching, delivered by a social enterprise, between 2017 and 2020, in Wythenshawe, a Manchester suburb. I investigated the nature of my work as a community educator. Learners and tutors involved in my practice participated in my study. The thesis aimed to search out the entanglements, discourses and practices that underpin and construct understandings about teaching, learning and relations with others. I also investigated whether these practices differed sufficiently from those of established teaching to be considered emergent. Although there have been many studies of community education, there is little research on small community enterprises operating in the liminal spaces between, education, arts, and community. To contextualise my research, I drew upon Communities of Practice (Wenger, 1998) and refinements to his theory, particularly knowledgeability (2014), Figured Worlds (Holland, 2001), (Gee, 2010), and Affect Theory notably Sarah Ahmed's (2014) work on emotion. I drew upon studies I considered relevant to my lived experience. These included Alison Gilchrist (2019) on networking, Sarah Banks (2018) on co-production and co-inquiry and the series of contemporary community research books in the Connected Communities series, notably (Jones and Perry, 2019) and (Campbell and Pahl, 2018). The study evidenced many aspects of my teaching sufficiently divergent from established models to suggest emergent practice. The study implies that at a time of austerity, the approaches to education I describe may provide a model of practice for other educators within a new paradigm of community teaching

Yhteisöllinen tiedonrakentelu ja verkottunut asiantuntijuus Twitter-palvelussa : Case #okfest

Aims. This qualitative study explored a phenomenon of epistemic communality around a Twitter hashtag. The primary aim of the study was to explore communal epistemic production on the Twitter platform, especially in the context of a mutually shared hashtag. The study explored the peer-production of knowledge and epistemic structures in the context of a specialist domain collaborating in the open Web. The secondary aim was to explore how Twitter functions as a platform for networked expertise and as a public agora for practitioners' expert discourse. This nascent mode of cultural production leads to the development of expert cultures on Twitter and in the open Web. This creates new contexts for informal collaborative learning and cultral production potentially answering some of the competence challenges presented by the 21st century. Methods. The hashtag #okfest was launched for the 'Open Knowledge Festival' conference held in Helsinki, Finland (17–22.9.2012). The participants of the study were open knowledge practitioners who participated in the hashtag discourse of #okfest on Twitter. All public tweets containing the string '#okfest' were collected as data. Tweets were analyzed with qualitative thematic analysis exploring the epistemic contributions either included in the tweets or as hyperlinked attachments. Results and conclusions. The analysis indicated how the hashtag was appropriated to serve as a node of communal knowledge sharing beyond mere reporting from the conference. The analysis observed six themes of communal knowledge building in the hashtag space. The communal epistemic activities in #okfest were likened to the properties of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998). A network of practitioners engaging in a mutual domain creates a dynamic 'social learning system' combining social interaction with the production and dissemination of knowledge. The study yielded a novel theoretical concept of 'expert microblogging', recognized as a significant genre of cultural production in a specialist domain on Twitter and in the open Web. Finally the Twitter platform was ascertained as a site for the manifestation of cultures of networked expertise.Tavoitteet. Tämä laadullinen tutkielma tutki episteemistä yhteisöllisyyttä Twitter-palvelussa hashtag-aihetunnisteen ympärillä. Hashtag #okfest lanseerattiin Helsingissä pidetyn 'Open Knowledge Festival' –konferenssin taustakanavaksi 17–22.9.2012. Tutkielman pääasiallinen tavoite oli tutkia yhteisöllistä tiedonrakentelua Twitter-palvelussa erityisesti hashtagien ympärillä. Tutkimus kohdistui tietyn toimialan tiedolliseen vertaistuotantoon Twitterissä ja avoimessa Internetissä. Laajempi tavoite oli tutkia miten Twitter toimii alustana verkottuneelle asiantuntijuudelle ja julkisten asiantuntijayhteisöjen vuorovaikutukselle. Tämä uusi kulttuurisen tuotannon konteksti mahdollistaa verkottuneiden asiantuntijakulttuurien kehittymisen Twitterissä ja avoimessa Internetissä. Tämä luo uusia tilaisuuksia informaalille yhteisölliselle oppimiselle ja kulttuuriselle tuotannolle mahdollisesti vastaten nykyajan vaativiin osaamishaasteisiin. Menetelmät. Tutkimuksen osallistujat olivat avoimen datan ammattilaisia, jotka osallistuivat Twitterissä #okfest keskusteluun konferenssin aikana. Kaikki julkiset Twitter-viestit #okfest aihetunnisteella kerättiin aineistoksi. Viestejä analysoitiin laadullisella temaattisella analyysillä koskien niiden tiedollisia kontribuutioita joko viestiin sisältyen tai linkitettynä. Tulokset ja johtopäätökset. Tutkimustulokset osoittavat että hashtag-aihetunnisteen ympärille syntyi yhteisöllisen tiedonrakentelun ilmiö, joka oli enemmän kuin pelkkää raportointia tapahtumapaikalta. Analyysissä löytyi kuusi yhteisöllisen tiedonrakentelun teemaa jotka ilmenivät hashtag-tilassa. Yhteisöllinen tiedonrakentelu muistutti käytäntöyhteisöjen teoriaperinteen (Wenger, 1998) vuorovaikutuksen piirteitä. Asiantuntijoiden yhteisöllinen vuorovaikutus synnytti "sosiaalisen oppimisen systeemin" jossa tiedonrakentelu yhdistyi vuorovaikutukseen. Tutkimustuloksista nousi uusi käsitteellistys, asiantuntijoiden alakohtainen tiedollinen tuotanto (eng. expert microblogging). Twitter-alustalle paikantui verkottuneiden asiantuntijakulttuurien kehittyminen avoimessa verkossa