Common Knowledge in Email Exchanges

We consider a framework in which a group of agents communicates by means of emails, with the possibility of replies, forwards and blind carbon copies (BCC). We study the epistemic consequences of such email exchanges by introducing an appropriate epistemic language and semantics. This allows us to find out what agents learn from the emails they receive and to determine when a group of agents acquires common knowledge of the fact that an email was sent. We also show that in our framework from the epistemic point of view the BCC feature of emails cannot be simulated using messages without BCC recipients.Comment: 34 pages. To appear in ACM Transactions on Computational Logi

A Method to Discover Digital Collaborative Conversations in Business Collaborations

Many companies have a suite of digital tools, such as Enterprise Social Networks, conferencing and document sharing software, and email, to facilitate collaboration among employees. During, or at the end of a collaboration, documents are often produced. People who were not involved in the initial collaboration often have difficulties understanding parts of its content because they are lacking the overall context. We argue there is valuable contextual and collaborative knowledge contained in these tools (content and use) that can be used to understand the document. Our goal is to rebuild the conversations that took place over a messaging service and their links with a digital conferencing tool during document production. The novelty in our approach is to combine several conversation-threading methods to identify interesting links between distinct conversations. Specifically we combine header-field information with social, temporal and semantic proximities. Our findings suggest the messaging service and conferencing tool are used in a complementary way. The primary results confirm that combining different conversation threading approaches is efficient to detect and construct conversation threads from distinct digital conversations concerning the same document

Children’s dialogue in the context of international research

In recent years, the study of religious diversity has become a significant educational issue in Europe and on the wider international scene. This is partly due to a recognition of the significance of religion as a factor in relation to issues of ethnic, national and cultural identity (Baumann, 1999), and as a factor in social divisiveness or social cohesion, for example as an indicator of what Modood calls ‘cultural racism’ (Modood, 1997).1 This development also reflects specific events such as the riots in some towns and cities in the north of England in 2001 (Home Office, 2001) and in Paris in 2005, and those of September 11, 2001 in the United States of America as well as their complex and ongoing consequences internationally (e.g. Beauchamp, 2002; Leganger-Krogstad, 2003). Such debates are especially relevant within states where migrants from a range of religious and cultural backgrounds have settled. The global and more local situations are related in a variety of ways, through the transnational identities of many families (Jackson and Nesbitt, 1993; Østberg, 2003) and the direct effects of international conflicts on community relations within particular states

Attention on Weak Ties in Social and Communication Networks

Granovetter's weak tie theory of social networks is built around two central hypotheses. The first states that strong social ties carry the large majority of interaction events; the second maintains that weak social ties, although less active, are often relevant for the exchange of especially important information (e.g., about potential new jobs in Granovetter's work). While several empirical studies have provided support for the first hypothesis, the second has been the object of far less scrutiny. A possible reason is that it involves notions relative to the nature and importance of the information that are hard to quantify and measure, especially in large scale studies. Here, we search for empirical validation of both Granovetter's hypotheses. We find clear empirical support for the first. We also provide empirical evidence and a quantitative interpretation for the second. We show that attention, measured as the fraction of interactions devoted to a particular social connection, is high on weak ties --- possibly reflecting the postulated informational purposes of such ties --- but also on very strong ties. Data from online social media and mobile communication reveal network-dependent mixtures of these two effects on the basis of a platform's typical usage. Our results establish a clear relationships between attention, importance, and strength of social links, and could lead to improved algorithms to prioritize social media content

Mental tactility: the ascendance of writing in online management education

A qualitative study of online management education and the role of writing as an indicative measure of thinking and learning. Established educational models, such as Dale\u27s Cone of Experience, are expanded and redeveloped to illustrate the central role of writing as a critical thinking process which appears to be increasing, rather than decreasing, with the advent of online multimedia technology. In an environment of increasing reliance on audiovisual stimulus in online education, the authors contend that tertiary educators may witness an ascendance or re-emergence of writing as central to the academic experience. This may be both supply and demand driven. Drawing on a study of two undergraduate units in the Bachelor of Commerce and applying hermeneutics to develop challenging insights, the authors present a case for educators to remain conversant with the art of teaching writing, and to promote writing to improve educational outcomes. <br /