Social network analysis of the video bloggers\u27 community in YouTube

This research studied the structure of the social network of the video blogger community on YouTube. It analyzed the social network structure of friends and subscribers of the 187 video bloggers on YouTube and calculated the social network measures. This thesis compares the results to the structure described by Warmbrodt et al. in 2007 and explains the reasons for the distinctions. The number of video bloggers has increased enormously, and the form of their interactions has changed. As a result, the video blogger social network has evolved from a core/periphery structure to one that is centralized. This indicates that the video blogger community on YouTube presently revolves around few central people in the network--Abstract, page iii

New Teacher Identity and the Edublogosphere: A Multi-Case Study of First Year Teacher Bloggers

New Internet and communication technologies (ICTs) facilitate collaboration and interaction among teachers. The increased presence of web-based tools in education settings prompted this qualitative inquiry. Widely available and inexpensive, these webbased tools (e.g., blogs, wikis, podcasts) provide opportunities for publishing content online. This multiple case study explores the sociocultural construct of identity formation (Holland & Lachicotte, 2007) of four first-year teachers who voluntarily blogged about their experiences. Data sources include the blog posts written by participants during the 2006-07 school year and responses to an electronic questionnaire emailed to participants at the end of the year. A qualitative content analysis (Alaszewski, 2006) was conducted to identify emergent themes in the data. Analysis was guided by a set of dimensions drawn from the research literature on teacher identity and grounded in the data. Findings represent six dimensions of teacher identity that include pedagogical, personal, intuitive, intellectual, social, and political aspects of teaching. The following conclusions were drawn by the researcher: (1) new teachers who capitalize on the affordances of blogging generate feedback from readers that substantiates their experiences and provides encouragement in times of struggle, (2) new teachers rely on their own educational histories to shape themselves as teachers, and (3) new teachers want a “safe place” to interact with other teachers, so much so that concerns about privacy, security and critique are outweighed by the benefits of communicating with other teachers through blogging

Aplicabilidade da teoria do caos a organizações

Objetivou-se compreender os fundamentos da Teoria do Caos na gestão das empresas, a existência de elementos típicos da Teoria do Caos, nos processos de planejamento, e variáveis controláveis que previnam o caos de ruptura. E se a visão, missão e objetivos consistem em atratores que evitam a instalação do caos de ruptura; e variáveis e faixas de controle utilizadas pelos dirigentes para evitar o caos de ruptura. A metodologia qualitativa empregou estudo exploratório, para identificar as variáveis e faixas de controle empregadas. Estudaram-se dez empresas, da Grande Belo Horizonte, evidenciando-se elementos típicos da Teoria do Caos nos processos de planejamento, e variáveis controláveis que podem evitar o caos de ruptura. Os resultados validaram as proposições teóricas iniciais, indicando a possibilidade da utilização dos conceitos da Teoria do Caos e controle de rupturas em mercados altamente competitivos

Exploring Divergent and Convergent Production in Idea Evaluation: Implications for Designing Group Creativity Support Systems

Most organizations need to evaluate novel ideas to identify their value. However, current idea evaluation research and practice hinder creativity by primarily facilitating convergent production (narrowing down ideas to a few tangible solutions) but discounting divergent production (the development of wildly creative and novel thoughts patterns). In this paper, I challenge this dominant view on idea evaluation by presenting a new theory I call dynamic idea evaluation and exploring the theory through a group creativity support system (GCSS) prototype. I designed the GCSS prototype as an idea portal that uses the knowledge created from the evaluation process to facilitate both convergent and divergent production. I designed the GCSS using an inductive and theory-building design science research (DSR) approach and interpretively analyzed it through an exploratory study in a Danish IS research department. I found that the GCSS demonstrates the ability to facilitate both divergent and convergent production during idea evaluation. Moreover, I add four design requirements and process architecture to help designers to build dynamic idea evaluation into this class of systems

A Genre Of Collective Intelligence: Blogs As Intertextual, Reciprocal, And Pedagogical

This thesis investigates the rhetorical features of blogs that lend them dialogic strength as an online genre through the lens of Mikhail Bakhtin\u27s theories of speech genres, utterances, and dialogism. As a relatively new online genre, blogs stem from previous genres (in print and online as well as verbal), but their emergence as a popular form of expression in our current culture demands attention to how blogs also offer us different rhetorical opportunities to meet our changing social exigencies as online subjects in the 21st century. This thesis was inspired by questions about how blogs redefine the rhetorical situation to alter our textual roles as readers, writers, and respondents in the new generic circumstances we encounter--and reproduce--online. Applying the framework of Henry Jenkins\u27 Convergence Culture and Pierre Levy\u27s Collective Intelligence, this thesis analyzes how blogs enable us as online subjects to add our utterances to our textual collective intelligence, which benefits from our personal experience and the epistemic conversations of blogs as online texts. In addition, it is also an inquiry into how the rhetorical circumstances of blogs as textual sites of collective intelligence can create a reciprocal learning environment in the writing classroom. I ultimately examine blogs through the lenses of alternative pedagogy--informed by David Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald\u27s Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom and Xin Liu Gale\u27s Teachers, Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom--to suggest the potential consequences of a writing education that includes how we are currently writing--and being written by--our culture\u27s online generic practice of blogs

Posthumanist Medicine: Participatory Healthcare, Medical Humanities, and Digital Media

This dissertation explores the construction of illness in the context of two interrelated processes that both propose a more empowered patient role and a whole person model for healthcare. Specifically, these contexts are the digitally mediated space of “health 2.0” and the medical movement toward humanistic practices, such as narrative medicine. This research identifies and questions some of the deeply ingrained humanistic leanings of these approaches to reveal how an essentialist understanding of the human perpetuates the modern biomedical conceptualization of healing. The concept of wholeness is deployed—in the sense of bodies, selves, and illness narratives—to continue understanding the sick body/mind as broken and in need of mending by institutionalized medicine. This same conceptualization is taken up online where individuals represent their experiences of illness. The space of health social networking sites serves as a reinforcement of the quantified self of modern medicine, a tactic employed to support commercial profitability. By critically analyzing the language and goals of medical humanities, the visual rhetoric, social use, and political economy of websites where online illness narratives are crafted, and the social contexts attached to the contemporary experience of illness, this dissertation argues for a posthumanist thought intervention in medical training, healthcare delivery, and digital health

Ceremonial Storytelling

US society has controversially debated civil-military relationships and war trauma since the Vietnam War. Civic activists today promote Indigenous warrior traditions as role models for non-Native veteran reintegration and health care. They particularly stress the role of ritual and narrative for civil-military negotiations of war experience and for trauma therapy. Applying a cultural-comparative lens, this book reads non-Native soldiers’ and veterans’ life writing from post-9/11 wars as «ceremonial storytelling.» It analyzes activist academic texts, «milblogs» written in the war zone, as well as «homecoming scenarios.» Soldiers’ and veterans’ interactions with civilians constitute jointly constructed, narrative civic rituals that discuss the meaning of war experience and homecoming

Paradigms, poverty and adaptive pluralism

In earlier analysis, two paradigms were identified in development professionalism, thinking and practice: one, often dominant, associated with things; and one, often subordinate, associated with people. Current development thinking and practice have diverged into two clusters, with procedures associated with the paradigm of things imposed by powerful actors and organisations in tension and contradiction with participatory methodologies (PMs) associated with the paradigm of people. A binocular vision sees both. This sets out to see further, and whether participatory methodologies (PMs) can bridge these binaries with both – and complementarities and win-wins. In recent years, PMs have proliferated. Contributing factors have been the way methods have multiplied, their versatility, adaptability and combinability, the explosion of applications of Information and Communication Technologies and Web 2.0, and more speculatively an increase in the number of people working in a creative participatory way. PMs that combine methods have proved increasingly versatile and adaptable to contexts and purposes. PMs are well suited to understanding and expressing the local, complex, diverse, dynamic, uncontrollable and unpredictable (lcdduu) realities experienced by many poor people. These contrast with the controlled conditions and universalities sought in much high status professionalism. Paradigmatically and practically, four domains have increasingly converged and cohere: PMs; poor people’s lcdduu realities; technology; and complexity. Paradigm can then be defined as a coherent and mutually supporting pattern of: concepts and ontological assumptions; values and principles; methods, procedures and processes; roles and behaviours; relationships; and mindsets, orientations and predispositions. Empirically, a paradigm of adaptive and participatory pluralism can be inferred from experience and examples. This fits with the realities of poor people as adaptive agents and with PMs seen through lenses of technology and complexity. It contrasts with a paradigm of neo- Newtonian practice. Adaptive pluralism embraces, underpins and expresses ideas and practices of reflexivity, continuous learning, value and principle-based eclectic improvisation, co-evolution and continuous emergence. Conceptually, it embodies paradigmatic synergies. Practically, it offers win-win solutions and generates an agenda for action

Netmodern: Interventions in Digital Sociology

The techno-economic grid of the Internet looks set to fulfil its autopoietic potentials as a global and multi-dimensionally immersive knowledge and memory archival network. This research project moves through a series of Digital Sociology case studies that mimic the changes in paradigms of the WWW from 2005-2010 in the forms of Web 1.0 to 2.0 and beyond to augmented reality and the cloud. Netmodern social theory is an emergent and speculative product of the research findings of this thesis and the subjective experiences of the researcher in experiencing and explaining digital realities in the research. All of the case studies employ practice-based approaches of original investigation through digital interventions completely immersed in particular waves of innovation and change. The role of the researcher shifts from administrator to mediator and observer as the very fabric of the social web transforms and evolves. The suggestion of the research findings is that you need to actually look at everything differently in order to study the research objects of emergent social agency and forms in digital media. Existing forms of critical analysis and methodological frameworks, particularly those concerned with conceptual models of media literacy or collective intelligence are insufficient as explanatory methods. Studying media literacy is most concerned with ‘how’ we create and interact in online social life beyond issues of simple accessibility. The focus of collective intelligence research is ‘what’ knowledge is available for interaction and a canvas for relationships between agency and knowledge forms. All of the case studies in this research project speak to and critique the intersections and relationships of emergent social agency and forms prevalent in Digital Sociology. The collective case studies explore online academic communities (BlogScholar), agency and popularity in the Twitter social network (Twae) and a variety of representations of collective intelligence in action (Web 2.0 cases studies). The research results suggest that the Internet is not so much intersecting with as it is being culture, economy, and technology