7,335 research outputs found

    WorldFinder: A tool for finding Virtual Worlds

    Get PDF

    Modeling Human Group Behavior In Virtual Worlds

    Get PDF
    Virtual worlds and massively-multiplayer online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. They provide new outlets for human social interaction that differ from both face-to-face interactions and non-physically-embodied social networking tools such as Facebook and Twitter. We aim to study group dynamics in these virtual worlds by collecting and analyzing public conversational patterns of users grouped in close physical proximity. To do this, we created a set of tools for monitoring, partitioning, and analyzing unstructured conversations between changing groups of participants in Second Life, a massively multi-player online user-constructed environment that allows users to construct and inhabit their own 3D world. Although there are some cues in the dialog, determining social interactions from unstructured chat data alone is a difficult problem, since these environments lack many of the cues that facilitate natural language processing in other conversational settings and different types of social media. Public chat data often features players who speak simultaneously, use jargon and emoticons, and only erratically adhere to conversational norms. Humans are adept social animals capable of identifying friendship groups from a combination of linguistic cues and social network patterns. But what is more important, the content of what people say or their history of social interactions? Moreover, is it possible to identify whether iii people are part of a group with changing membership merely from general network properties, such as measures of centrality and latent communities? These are the questions that we aim to answer in this thesis. The contributions of this thesis include: 1) a link prediction algorithm for identifying friendship relationships from unstructured chat data 2) a method for identifying social groups based on the results of community detection and topic analysis. The output of these two algorithms (links and group membership) are useful for studying a variety of research questions about human behavior in virtual worlds. To demonstrate this we have performed a longitudinal analysis of human groups in different regions of the Second Life virtual world. We believe that studies performed with our tools in virtual worlds will be a useful stepping stone toward creating a rich computational model of human group dynamics

    Social Media Roadmaps. Exploring the futures triggered by social media.

    Get PDF
    Social media refers to a combination of three elements: content, user communities and Web 2.0 technologies. This foresight report presents six roadmaps of the anticipated developments of social media in three themes: society, companies, and local environment. One of the roadmaps, the meta-roadmap, is the synthesis of them all. The society sub-roadmap explores societal participation through communities. There are three sub-roadmaps relating to companies: interacting with companies through communities, social media in work environment, and social media enhanced shopping. The local environment sub-roadmap looks at social media in local environment. The roadmapping process was carried out through two workshops at VTT. The results of the report are crystallized into five main development lines triggered by social media. First development line is transparency referring to its increasing role in society, both with positive and negative consequences. The second development line is the rise of ubiquitous participatory communication model. This refers to an increase of two-directional and community-based interactivity in every field, where it has some added value. The third development is reflexive empowerment. This refers to the role of social media as an enabler of grass-root community collaboration. The fourth development line is the duality personalization/fragmentation vs. mass effects/integration. Personalization /fragmentation emphasises the tailoring of the web services and content. This development is counterweighted by mass effects/integration, like the formation of super-nodes in the web. The fifth development line is the new relations of physical and virtual worlds. This development line highlights the idea that practices induced by social media, e.g. communication, participation, co-creation, feedback and rating, will get more common in daily environment, and that virtual and physical worlds will be more and more interlinked.</p

    Novel Idea Generation, Collaborative Filtering, and Group Innovation Processes

    Get PDF
    Organizations that innovate encounter challenges due to the complexity and ambiguity of generating and making sense of novel ideas. Exacerbated in group settings, we describe these challenges and propose potential solutions. Specifically, we design group processes to support novel idea generation and selection, including use of a novel-information discovery (NID) tool to support creativity and brainstorming, as well as group support system and collaborative-filtering tools to support evaluation and decision making. Results indicate that the NID tool increases efficiency and effectiveness in creative tasks and that the collaborative-filtering tool can support the decision-making process by focusing the group’s attention on ideas that might otherwise be neglected. Combining these two novel tools with group processes provides valuable contributions to both research and practice

    Social media in qualitative research: Challenges and recommendations

    Get PDF
    The emergence of social media on the Internet provides an opportunity for information systems researchers to examine new phenomena in new ways. However, for various reasons qualitative researchers in IS have not fully embraced this opportunity. This paper looks at the potential use of social media in qualitative research in information systems. It discusses some of the challenges of using social media and suggests how qualitative IS researchers can design their studies to capitalize on social media data. After discussing an illustrative qualitative study, the paper makes recommendations for the use of social media in qualitative research in IS

    Emerging technologies for learning report (volume 3)

    Get PDF

    Personalized Student Assessment based on Learning Analytics and Recommender Systems

    Get PDF
    This paper presents a process based on learning analytics and recommender systems with the objective of analyzing student assessment in order to provide clues that can help teachers in scaffolding the students’ performance. For this, a set of tests was used to evaluate students' competence in direct current circuits. The tests had multiple versions and to solve them each student had to use multiple approaches. The results indicate a better performance in calculus and simulations approaches when compared with hands-on and remote laboratories approaches. The analyses also provide support for the recommendation step allowing the configuration of a knowledge base. The process as a whole is consistent in what regards its ability to make suggestions to the students as they complete a given test and to provide teachers with information that can help them formulate strategies to positively impact students’ learning.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
    • …
    corecore