Content quality assessment related frameworks for social media

The assessment of content quality (CQ) in social media adds a layer of complexity over traditional information quality assessment frameworks. Challenges arise in accurately evaluating the quality of content that has been created by users from different backgrounds, for different domains and consumed by users with different requirements. This paper presents a comprehensive review of 19 existing CQ assessment related frameworks for social media in addition to proposing directions for framework improvements

Promoting learner autonomy through multiliteracy skills development in cross-institutional exchanges

This contribution presents findings from two empirical case studies, which followed a task-based telecollaborative learning format. Participants included student teacher trainees, tutors, and language learners from colleges/universities in Germany, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The projects aimed at promoting learner autonomy through awareness raising of modes and meaning-making online and multiliteracy skills development based on hands-on analysis of web resources and social networking tools. It was hoped that this awareness would foster the teachers' own autonomy in virtual learning environments and enable them to design tasks which—in turn—would promote learner autonomy as understood by Palfreyman (2006): the informed use of a range of interacting resources in context. We argue that this awareness is reflected in enhanced multimodal communicative competence, i.e., “the ability to understand the combined potential of various modes for making meaning” (Royce, 2002, p. 92), and multiliteracy, with the latter allowing teachers and learners to realize the potential of blended and online only settings for language acquisition purposes. Ideally then, while becoming gradually more versed in multimodality and multiliteracy, learners can also take over more control and self-direct their own learning when working online (Benson, 2001) which are also characteristics of autonomy

Collaborative annotation on the Web

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 69-72).More and more, web users are moving from simply consuming content on the web to creating it as well, in the form of discussion boards, weblogs, wikis, and other collaborative and conversational media. Despite this, the web remains largely read-only; web designers create sites that are designed to be consumed by the public, much like other, traditional mass media. In this thesis, I explore free, shared annotation as a means of making the web more writable. In doing so, I hope to empower readers to engage more deeply with web content by actively participating in its production, and to have a voice on equal footing with those of the media producers whose content they consume. This thesis details the design and evaluation of Webbed Footnotes, a system for publicly annotating web documents. Though it is not the first such system, its design is novel in that it is sensitive to the needs of both the would-be annotators and the owners of the websites being annotated. In particular, annotators would like their additions to be highly visible, yet website owners demand that their sites be presented in the manner they intended. Webbed Footnotes attempts to fulfill both of these conditions by making annotations highly visible, yet ensuring that the underlying documents remain legible.(cont.) If Webbed Footnotes can partially solve the tension between annotators and authors, then public, shared annotation on the web may have a chance for widespread success, leading to savvier and more engaged readers.by Scott Andrew Golder.S.M

Produced subjectivities and productive subjects : locating the potential of the self-reflective blog

Blogging software has popularly been used as a mode of writing about everyday life to interact with others. This thesis examines the political potentials that are opened up by self-reflective blogging. The self-reflective blog is a synergy of self-reflective practices and computer-mediated communication. A genealogy of the history of computer-mediated communication and various public self-reflective practices is conducted to uncover affect as the utility of various economies of subject production. Efforts made to blog-like the efforts made to interact online in other CMCs-are positioned as a kind of affective labor. Adapting Hardt and Negri's (2005) theorization of the multitude, whereby affective labor-the production of social relationshipsis a kind ofbiopolitical production, affect will be determined as a kind ofbiopolitical power that exists in everyday life

BlogForever D5.3: User Questionnaires and Reports

This report presents the feedback gathered from third party users during the BlogForever Case Studies. Therefore, the research framework is defined and the case studies results are presented, followed by a summary of conclusions and remarks

Visualisation of interaction footprints for enagement in online communities

Glahn, C., Specht, M., & Koper, R. (2009). Visualisation of interaction footprints for engagement in online communities [Special issue]. In M. Kalz, R. Koper & V. Hornung-Prähauser (Eds.), Journal of Educational Technology & Society, 12(3), 44-57.Contextualised and ubiquitous learning are relatively new research areas that combine the latest developments in ubiquitous and context aware computing with educational approaches in order to provide structure to more situated and context aware learning. The majority of recent activities in contextualised and ubiquitous learning focus on mobile scenarios, with location as the primary contextual dimension. However, the meaning of context aware learner support is not limited to location based solutions, as it is highlighted by the educational paradigms of situated learning and communities of practice. This paper analyses learner participation as a contextual dimension of adapting graphical indicators of interaction data for engaging and motivating learners in participating and contributing to an open community. The analysis is based on interaction data and interviews with participants in a nine week lasting design study, during which we compared the effect of two indicators on the engagement of the participants in the group activities. The trend of study results supports the presumption that the learners' perception of their activity visualisations is context dependent. We found that more engaging visualisation polarised the participants in this group: while contributing participants were attracted to contribute more to the community, non-contributing participants were distracted by the same visualisation.The work on this publication has been sponsored by the TENCompetence Integrated Project that is funded by the European Commission's 6th Framework Programme, priority IST/Technology Enhanced Learning. Contract 027087 [http://www.tencompetence.org

Trade unions twitter analytics: to what extent trade unions interact with youth?

Young people experience the highest level of unemployment and, even when in employment, they register the highest level of labour market outsiderness, compared to adults. Institutions could play a pivotal role in increasing the level of social justice for youth, promoting their condition in the labour market. Traditionally, the institution aimed at representing and promoting workers' interests is the trade union, but evidence shows, paradoxically, difficulties of trade unions in getting in contact with the most vulnerable workers - youth - mostly due to youth labour market structural characteristics. Since workers decision of joining a union comes later in the (working) life (as evident by the age distribution of trade unions' members) it remains unclear if youth membership has to be included (or not) among trade unions’ strategic priorities. In the wave of increasing digital interaction between citizens and social institutions and the increasing use of social media as research tool in social sciences, the aim of this research is to stress, by using Twitter as a unique source of data, first, the extent to which trade unions are at the centre of debate, compared to theoretically similar institutions and, second, the extent to which trade unions interact with or speak about youth in six countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK. Results show that social media discussions referring to "trade unions" is lower than for other similar socio-political institutions, this being true in all six languages analysed in a random month. Moreover, notwithstanding the fact that trade unions in the analysed countries are all formally present on Twitter, interaction with different institutions, and in particular with the youth sphere is limited and mostly done by trade unions’ youth groups, while most communication flows of national trade unions are rather “auto-referential”, i.e. mostly referring to the trade union itself. Analysing (up to) 3.200 tweets written by each of the national trade unions, only a small part (3% on average) is directed to (or concerns) youth. When looking at the Twitter accounts of trade unions youth groups (when existent), youth are of course more at the centre of communications (32% on average). These results may suggest the fact that youth are, in practice, considered as a topic that is out of national trade unions' ordinary agenda and daily business, falling instead mostly in trade unions' youth specific group business, and thus supporting the hypothesis that youth membership is not specifically addressed by trade unions at the national level, especially in those countries where no specific youth department of unions exists

A knowledge services roadmay for online learning

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering; and, (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-78).In today's society, there is a need for organizations to have a robust knowledge infrastructure in place, so that they can create or acquire knowledge; store knowledge; disseminate knowledge, and protect and manage their knowledge assets. However, with advances in the publishing media, our ability to generate information has far exceeded our abilities to find, review and understand it, thus leading to "Information Overload". Information overload refers to the inability to extract needed knowledge from existing information due to the volume of information, or lack of understanding of information and its whereabouts, or efficient ways to locate relevant information. These issues could be addressed by having efficient Knowledge Management Systems/Knowledge Services, so that people can create and understand available information, and have services to help them learn effectively and make better decisions. To tackle the new information needs, the use of technologies such as Weblog Services (weblog-enabled knowledge services) offer opportunities for decentralized knowledge creation and dissemination; as such tools put the authors in charge of knowledge creation process without any administration-enforced policies. Learning environments are also typically characterized by challenges such as barriers to use, quality control and relevance issues, or issues of credibility of information. These issues are effectively tackled by weblog services since weblogs are often open source and need no training for authoring. In addition, favorite blogs act as information filters or "bird dogs" and point at useful information. Feedback incorporated in weblog services makes people react and learn "interactively" and also enhances credibility and trust in information.(cont.) Weblog services can also share published content through the process of Content Syndication, and thus offer an insight into knowledge assets in the timeliest of ways. This thesis report describes certain weblog services implementations carried out at MIT. Results of such implementations have emphasized the applications of such weblog (knowledge) services in knowledge sharing and online learning. However, there are certain issues to be addressed in weblog services such as privacy and intellectual property issues, as well as resolution of organizational tussles in the domain of content syndication standards.by Anand Rajagopal.S.M