Citizen-led Work using Social Computing and Procedural Guidance

Online platforms enable people to interact with friends, family, and the world at large. How might people go beyond sharing stories and ideas to building and testing theories in the real world? While many are motivated to dig deeper into their lived experience, limited expertise and lack of platform support make complex activities like experimentation dauntingly hard. Novices benefit greatly from expert guidance: this thesis advocates baking the guidance into the interface itself.This dissertation introduces procedural guidance to build just-in-time expertise for difficult tasks. Procedural guidance has multiple advantages: it is minimal, leverages teachable moments, and can be ability-specific. This dissertation instantiates this insight of procedural guidance through a sequence of increasingly complex social computing systems: Gut Instinct for curating ideas, Docent for generating hypotheses, and Galileo for citizen-led experiments.Gut Instinct hosts online learning materials and enables people to collaboratively brainstorm potential influences on people’s microbiome. Docent explicitly teaches people to create hypotheses by combining personal insights and online learning with task-specific scaffolding. Finally, Galileo reifies experimentation in the software, provides multiple roles for contribution, and automatically manages interdependencies. Multiple evaluations—controlled experiments and field deployments with online communities including American Gut participants—demonstrate that procedural guidance enables people to transform intuitions to hypotheses and structurally-sound experiments. By enabling people to draw on lived experience, this dissertation harbingers a future where people can convert their intuitions to actionable plans and implement these plans with online communities. This dissertation concludes by discussing opportunities for complex work using social computing platforms

mHealth Research Applied to Regulated and Unregulated Behavioral Health Sciences

Behavioral scientists are developing new methods and frameworks that leverage mobile health technologies to optimize individual level behavior change. Pervasive sensors and mobile apps allow researchers to passively observe human behaviors “in the wild” 24/7 which supports delivery of personalized interventions in the real-world environment. This is all possible because these technologies contain an incredible array of sensors that allow applications to constantly record user location and can contextualize current environmental conditions through barometers, thermometers, and ambient light sensors and can also capture audio and video of the user and their surroundings through multiple integrated high-definition cameras and microphones. These tools are a game changer in behavioral health research and, not surprisingly, introduce new ethical, regulatory/legal and social implications described in this article

Memes inside and outside the Internet - how digital entertainment mirrors the human psyche

The essay sets out to explain how the meme-sharing mechanism on the Internet is the reflection of human psyche. Starting from Richard Dawkins’ definition of meme, the analysis focuses on the search of what make Internet memes go viral, with the supporting theories of Richard Brodie about the effect of memes on human mind and Limor Shifman’s studies about memes in digital culture. Having described the elements of adaptability, accessibility, belonging, exclusivity, nonsense, irony, cuteness, contrast, surprise, political incorrectness, and stereotype, meme genres such as image macros, videos and photoshop-edited pictures are analyzed across the spectrum of such factors. The result is subsequently compared to the ones obtained by Shifman in 2014, in order to find common elements to outline a spreading pattern. The third and last section focus on the effects of memes on human brain, starting from Brodie’s “button pushing” theory, which refers to many mechanisms such as “repetition”, “cognitive dissonance”, and “creating value” that trigger humans’ most basic instincts. By comparing such theory with Shifman’s about memes providing freedom of expression, the suggested solution concentrate on raising awareness the real potential of memes among people and providing them the means to make memes work for a more conscious society

Theorising teaching

Theorising of teaching is not limited to the major theorists, as researchers and teachers also theorise teaching. This article explores theorising by researchers and a teacher in two ways: firstly, an overview or framework from the research literature on teaching as a sociocultural practice is developed, and secondly, the framework is tested by analysing the transcripts of a beginning teacher talking about her teaching

Breaking the Silence: The Role of Online Community in the Transition to Motherhood

This study presents a grounded theory of the tensions that exist in the transition to motherhood. More specifically, this study investigated both the tensions that emerged within interactions in online communities as well as the communicative practices community members used to manage tensions. Using a qualitative grounded theory approach, interactions from an online community were analyzed. Results from this study suggest that new mothers use online communities to communicate about challenges around the transition to motherhood, highlighting tensions around (a) expertise and experiences, (b) mother-led and baby-led practices, and (c) expectations and experience. Community members develop a range of communicative strategies to make sense of these tensions. Finding suggest two significant directions for research on studying online mothering communities: (a) the importance of examining underlying communication processes and (b) examining the nature of tensions that arise in these communities to understand the role online community plays in the lives of new mothers. As expectations for motherhood continue to change and as mothers increasingly turn to the Internet for seeking information and community, research needs to continue to devote attention to understanding the importance of this community during the transition to motherhood

An investigation of the acquisition and sharing of tacit knowledge in software development teams

Knowledge in general, and tacit knowledge in particular, has been hailed as an important factor for successful performance in knowledge-worker teams. Despite claims of the importance of tacit knowledge, few researchers have studied the concept empirically, due in part to the confusion surrounding its conceptualisation. The present study examined the acquisition and sharing o f tacit knowledge and the consequent effect on team performance, through social interaction and the development of a transactive memory system (TMS). TMSs are important for the acquisition and sharing of tacit knowledge, since they enact ‘collective minds’ of teams, and are also a factor in successful team performance. In order to conduct this research, a team-level operational definition of tacit knowledge was forwarded and a direct measure of tacit knowledge for software development teams, called the Team Tacit Knowledge Measure (TTKM ) was developed and validated. To investigate the main premise of this research an empirical survey study was conducted which involved 48 software development teams (n = 181 individuals), from Ireland and the UK. Software developers were chosen as the example of knowledge-worker teams because they work with intangible cognitive processes. It was concluded that tacit knowledge was acquired and shared directly through good quality social interactions and through the development of a TMS. Quality of social interaction was found to be a more important route through which teams can learn and share tacit knowledge, than was transactive memory. However, transactive memory was not a mediator between social interaction and team tacit knowledge, indicating that both provided separate contributions. Team tacit knowledge was found to predict team performance above and beyond transactive memory, though both were significant. Based on these findings recommendations were made for the management of software development teams and for future research directions

Technology, Trust, and the Flow of Quality Information: A Grounded Theory Study of Decision-Making Among K-12 Education Leaders in New York State

This qualitative study utilizing the grounded theory methodology examined the lived experiences of education leaders in New York State regarding decision-making in light of the extreme variability in the flow and quality of online information. Study findings indicated that the leaders’ strong desire to avoid misinformation, combined with the strong tendency to rely on social influence exerted within local and regional peer groups, ultimately limited the amount of interaction or reliance upon online sources for decision-making. Study participants indicated they relied heavily on trusted advisors and peer groups in the same geographic area for professional advice and as a decision-making sounding board. An emerging theoretical framework, the transput lens for education leadership decision-making, was created to provide an approach to understanding ways K-12 education leaders interface with information in decision-making in the face of copious amounts of information, social influence, and both human and technological biases inherent in everyday interactions and platforms. The preliminary theory of a transput leadership paradigm illuminates the concurrency of communication inputs/outputs required of a leader making decisions in the fast-paced environment of the digital age. Recommendations included further research on the cognitive strategies of disconfirmation, and utilizing quantitative research with an expanded sample population. Further recommendations included expanding professional networks beyond the local level to increase opportunities for diversity of thought, and modeling of digital citizenship behaviors proactively for school and community stakeholders

Intuiting, Socializing and Playing Around: Women’s Stories of Informal Learning in the Information Technology Field

This report is based on a study of the informal and alternative approaches to learning of women who are working in the rapidly expanding and changing IT field. Using their intuition, borrowing and sharing expertise, and through trial and error, study participants describe essential forms of learning often unacknowledged by both workers and employer

Long violent history : the news values of the Blackjewel coal miner protest

How do journalists cover those outside of their own experience? As researchers study newsroom diversity, this has been one of the most pressing issues on editors and publishers as they try to improve trust with marginalized communities and diversity in their own newsroom. This led me to a very simple question: How well do journalists understand their own coverage? I used the explanatory structure suggested by Creswell and Plano Clark (2011) to develop in-depth interviews, which were then contextualized by content analysis. I compared the analysis of what the journalists thought they portrayed in their writing, and what actually appeared. Ultimately, I found that while the reporters I interviewed had fine-tuned control over depicting the conflict and impact value of a news story, they struggled with other elements. I also found in the interviews there are implications about how newsrooms think of news values, and more research is needed to understand how descriptive news values influence coverage.Includes bibliographical references (pages 62-71