Establishing and Sustaining School Leader Networks through Computer Supported Collaborative Learning

Two goals of the university‘s postgraduate programme in educational management and leadership is; (a) to establish a learning support network amongst each cohort in order to stimulate ease and openness of professional sharing and so enhance course learning; and (b) to promote sustainable school leader networking in the field. ‗Moodle‘, a recently introduced computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) technology, uses asynchronous discussion forums to create opportunities for professional and social support which are intended to complement face-to-face meetings. Such discussion forums are immediately helpful for providing personalised advice when needed (‗just for me; just in time‘ support) to the school leaders who have been away from tertiary study for some time and have grown unfamiliar with juggling personal, professional and student life. Long term, these discussion forums will hopefully stimulate the school leaders to establish and sustain their own online forums once their study is completed and they are back out in the field. Such an ‗anywhere anytime‘ support network would be especially helpful for newly appointed school leaders and those in isolated areas. Appropriately moderated asynchronous threaded discussions that are interspersed with face-toface meetings require a teaching methodology that emphasises active student-centred problembased collaborative learning, in order to improve discussion structure and team problem solving, and develop a communal sense of professional learning. This same innovation also supports the university‘s partner, the Ministry of Education, by helping it establish professional knowledge communities amongst school leaders at cluster and district levels in order to align systemic vision and school-based improvement action plans. This paper contains; a rationale for using an online professional discussion forum to establish a hybrid professional community of practice; a description of the ‗moodle‘ technology; establishing the technology in and existing on-campus leader development course; ensuring a positive initial response to the technology; and efforts to sustain the hybrid school leader support network

Quantifying the skewed distribution of activity in virtual communities within a longitudinal study

Virtual Communities (ViCs) are subject of interest for quite some time now [Hagel and Armstrong, 1997, Garton, et al., 1997, Rheingold, 1993]. Recently, ViCs in the form of Social Network Services like MySpace or StudiVz received a lot of attention. Though, fairly little is known about the temporal evolution of virtual communities and the changes in the communication activity of its users. The research described here is an explorative study examining the communication activity of members of two virtual communities on a longitudinal basis. For that purpose, a graph theoretical model by Pennock et al. [2002] is used which unites “Random Network Theory” and “Scale-free Networks”. This model allows the operationalization of the empirical distribution functions of the communication activity in ViCs with only one free parameter. That parameter – the mixing factor α – represents the ratio between the antagonists heterogeneity and homogeneity. The nonlinear curve fitting of the empirical distribution functions shows a predominance of preferential over uniform binding in both communities. Participants prefer to communicate with community members having already a lot of communication partners, while members with low activity are less attractive. This phenomenon is less strong in the smaller ViC B. The members of ViC B have almost twice as many connections as those of ViC A. ViC B represent a tighter network which might lead to the more homogeneous distribution of its activity. In both communities the mixing factor α and therefore the level of heterogeneity shows quite stable over time

Emergence Antecedents of Enterprise Social Media Networks: A Literature Review and Directions for Future Research

What drives the emergence of enterprise social media (ESM) networks? This question cannot be fully answered without studying the scattered body of knowledge. The current research in progress paper addresses this question by means of a preliminary literature review. Precisely, it synthesizes 34 literature findings into a preliminary literature review, which will be further refined and augmented by a research agenda in the future steps. The main theoretical contribution of this paper is to describe 21 antecedents that drive ESM network emergence. In practice, knowledge about these emergence antecedents can be used for various application cases. Examples include developing ESM recommender systems, creating ESM network simulation models, and planning and conducting organizational interventions to optimize ESM networks

Relational and Attributive Activity in Virtual Communities

Although Virtual Communities (ViCs) have been considered as an important e-commerce instrument, little is known about their evolution and the changes in the communication activity of its users. A frequent finding is that a small number of the participants is responsible for the majority of messages and, in contrast, a large portion of the users only write one or a few message(s). This discrepancy deserves more attention. In this paper, the heterogeneity of the communication activity is examined longitudinally on the basis of the graph-theoretical models "Random Network Theory" and "Scale-free Networks". The fusion of these two models allows operationalization of the heterogeneity of the relational as well as the attributive communication activity in ViCs. The adjustment of the empirical distribution functions of the examined ViCs to this model shows a predominance of preferential over uniform binding. This "rich get richer phenomenon" proves temporally stable and leads to the emergence of heterogeneity of the member's activities. We conclude that instead of stimulating all participants, it appears to be more promising to address the lead users as a main target. Their attachments to other users may be utilized in a positive and amplifying way in order increase a community's communication activity

Lurking: Legitimate or Illegitimate Peripheral Participation?

By sponsoring, promoting or simply monitoring virtual communities related to their products, work processes, and other topics of interest, organizations leverage the efforts, insights, and abilities of individuals inside and outside their organization. Lurkers are participants who persistently demure from engaging in the core activities that sustain a virtual community. Because virtual communities are perpetuated through voluntary contributions, the persistent peripheral participation of lurkers is sometimes viewed negatively as social loafing or free-riding. Alternatively, an individual may engage in legitimate peripheral participation when their passive monitoring of group activities educates, socializes, and otherwise prepares them for more effective contribution. We reconcile these conflicting views of lurking with individual- and community-level models of peripheral participation that include a parsimonious typology of virtual communities. Through empirical tests based on over 395,000 observations gathered over five months from 548 online discussion forums, we demonstrate how lurking effects growth in site membership and participation. We conclude that lurking as legitimate or illegitimate peripheral participation is context-dependent and a more complex, nuanced activity than previously theorized and measured

Da hipótese de mercados eficientes às finanças comportamentais

Monografia (graduação)—Universidade de Brasília, Faculdade de Economia, Administração e Contabilidade, Departamento de Economia, 2014.Um dos principais objetos de discussão em Finanças pauta-se na validade das premissas adotadas pela teoria clássica, amplamente estabelecida na década de 1970, destacando-se a racionalidade dos agentes econômicos. Na década seguinte, dada a crescente quantidade de evidências empíricas demonstrando um excesso de volatilidade no modelo dominante, surgem explicações comportamentais e axiomas psicológicos antes desconsiderados. Estas novas linhas de pensamento culminam na origem do promissor campo de estudos denominado de Finanças Comportamentais. O objetivo deste trabalho é analisar a complexa evolução desse segmento acadêmico que atualmente configura uma das mais relevantes vertentes dentro da área de Finanças. ________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACTOne of the main issues in Finance is the validity of the assumptions made by the classical theory, widely established in the 1970s, emphasizing the rationality of economic agents. In the following decade, given the growing amount of empirical evidence demonstrating excessive volatility in the dominant model, behavioral and psychological explanations axioms, previously neglected, began to be used. These new lines of reasoning culminated in the rise of the promising field of study called Behavioral Finance. The goal of this work is to analyze the complex evolution of this academic discipline that currently sets one of the most relevant subjects in Finance

Forming Your Terrorist Network: ISIS, Twitter, and the Terrorist Propaganda Campaign

Since the founding of the Caliphate in June 2014, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria has gained worldwide media attention for its campaign of violence across Iraq and Syria. Social media, particularly Twitter, has become a main aspect of ISIS's media campaign. It has been used to spread propagandistic images and videos of ISIS into the Twittersphere. This propaganda is important to ISIS because it spreads their message far past its occupied borders and helps to gain support from a wider audience. Using social media analysis and Twitter's own APIs, this research focused on ISIS's Twitter propaganda campaign and sought to discover the underlying network structure. The resulting network structure - scale-free - is then analyzed to see how it affects ISIS's dissemination of propaganda on Twitter. Ultimately, this research hopes to start a conversation on how network structure can be used to stop terrorist organizations from spreading their message online.Master of Science in Information Scienc

What Instructional Modification Implementations Bring Adult Education Learners To Success And Retention? Analysis Of An Online Adult Basic Education Program

What Instructional Modification Implementations Bring Adult Education Learners to Success and Retention? Analysis of an Online Adult Basic Education Program. Adult learners enrolled in my online Adult Basic Education program showed low completion rates for the course. This study\u27s purpose was to discover what instructional modifications would bring these learners to a successful outcome in the program. I implemented the following instructional modifications: asynchronous email communication, weekly progress reports emailed to each participant and a minimum requirement of 10 assignment completions on a weekly basis. Teacher-student interaction increased because of these implementations. I reviewed literature that discussed distance education, adult learners and teacher-student interaction to discover strategies that would improve student achievement in an online course. After reviewing the literature, I determined that there were three missing elements in my program: structured communication between the teacher and student (Palloff & Pratt, 1999), standards for online coursework completion (Comings et al., 1999) and a system to inform students of their progress in the program (Comings et al., 1999). I found that teacher-student asynchronous communication, a weekly requirement of 10 completed lessons and weekly progress reports of student accomplishments encouraged students to complete coursework on a regular basis. Students were conscientious, taking more responsibility for their learning. Students had a higher rate of coursework completions during the research study period, with performance increasing 73%

Asynchronous discussion groups as Small World and Scale Free Networks

What is the network form of online discussion groups? What are the topological parameters delineating the interaction on such groups? We report an empirical examination of the form of online discussion groups. We are interested in examining whether such groups conform to the Small World and the Scale Free models of networks. Support for these expectations provides a formal expression of growth, survival potential and preferential attachment in the connection patterns in discussion groups. The research questions were tested with a sample of over 8,000 active participants, and over 30,000 messages. We find that the social network resulting from discussion groups is indeed a Scale Free Network, based on In, Out and All Degree distributions. We also find that, for the same sample, discussion groups are a Small World Network too. As expected, the clustering coefficients for these groups differ significantly from random networks, while their characteristic path lengths are similar to random networks. Implications of the topology for the design and understanding of discussion groups include the stability and control of such groups, as well as their longevity