Culture or social interaction? A study of influential factors on weblog design

The importance of blogs and social networking as medium of interactions had gain substantial popularity in mainstream media. Such popularity is due to blogs timely publication, ease of use and wide availability. Blogs hypertext and hyperlinks spread information and influence through an underlying social network. Taking into consideration that past studies on web design have focused on cultural traits on design elements, this paper aims to analyse the patterns on blog design from the perspectives of social influence and interactions. Examining design patterns from five networks of blogs using content analysis method, the results show that design of blogs in an online network shares similar elements and the pattern is different from one network to the other

The use of Livemocha: a platform for independent language learning

The Covid -19 pandemic has affected all aspect of human’s life including the educational institution. All the activities are then held mostly online. Many online platform are used as a tool to interact between teacher and students. Despite their massive growth in online teaching, little research has been conducted about the use of online language learning community in learning foreign language. The aim of this study is to examine the use of Livemocha to learn foreign language independently. This study uses autoethnography method which uses the researcher personal experience to describe and analyze the data. Result of this study shows that the site is useful for learning English independently. This study concludes with suggestions for English Learning through social networking site

ScreenTrack: Using a Visual History of a Computer Screen to Retrieve Documents and Web Pages

Computers are used for various purposes, so frequent context switching is inevitable. In this setting, retrieving the documents, files, and web pages that have been used for a task can be a challenge. While modern applications provide a history of recent documents for users to resume work, this is not sufficient to retrieve all the digital resources relevant to a given primary document. The histories currently available do not take into account the complex dependencies among resources across applications. To address this problem, we tested the idea of using a visual history of a computer screen to retrieve digital resources within a few days of their use through the development of ScreenTrack. ScreenTrack is software that captures screenshots of a computer at regular intervals. It then generates a time-lapse video from the captured screenshots and lets users retrieve a recently opened document or web page from a screenshot after recognizing the resource by its appearance. A controlled user study found that participants were able to retrieve requested information more quickly with ScreenTrack than under the baseline condition with existing tools. A follow-up study showed that the participants used ScreenTrack to retrieve previously used resources and to recover the context for task resumption.Comment: CHI 2020, 10 pages, 7 figure

Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PET) and web-based social networks (WBSN)

The technological threatens to the right of privacy are not only limited to databases. WBSN and pervasive computer, for instance, are two clear examples of other privacy risks. WBSN have an economic value, and more and more tools focus on WBSN users' personal information. On the contrary, WBSN privacy is only a new research area. Internet communities are trust-based systems. Therefore, they need a privacy-respecting reputation system. Transparency tools should also allow individuals to check at any desired moment what personal data has been given to the data systems, and be able to alter or delete it. IT researchers usually consider privacy as a quantifiable attribute that can be negotiated and possibly exchanged by individuals in return for certain benefits. On the contrary, PET are necessary in WBSN. Thus, they cannot simply be individual options. Human rights, as public policies, should be preserved in the design of IT tools

Understanding Roles and User Experience of Mobile Technology in Co-located Interaction

Over the last few decades, mobile phones have evolved into ubiquitous devices that support remote communication and various kinds of personal activities. Due to their personal nature, device users are engaged in interactions on mobile devices and pay less attention to other people around them. Furthermore, as the user interface is optimized for a single person use, it reduces sharing and interaction capabilities with co-located people, which negatively influences the opportunities for shared experiences and social activities. This thesis attempts to understand how mobile technology can be designed for co-located interaction.Previous literature on the topic indicates that mobile technology is designed and employed in co-located interaction to fulfill one of these objectives - inviting interaction, facilitating interaction, encouraging interaction or enforcing interaction. While mobile technology facilitating interaction is investigated the most, this research further explores the remaining three objectives.This thesis belongs to the research field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). This research follows research through design approach, producing the contribution of knowledge through design interventions. This compound thesis includes six studies, introducing seven concepts for mobile application, a novel design for a mobile device, and two functional prototypes. Four studies explore mobile technology ‘inviting interaction’; one study explores the technology aiming to ‘encourage interaction’ and the other study explores the mobile technology ‘enforcing interaction’. The intended contexts of use are for leisure and non-work-related activities, with an emphasis on enhancing the co-located social interaction in the activities.The empirical findings of this thesis include both subjective user experiences and objective observations of users’ interactions engendered by mobile technology as well as reflections on the findings in light of existing literature. Based on these findings, this thesis provides insights about 1) The user experience in respect to mobile technology in different co-located interactions; and 2) The roles that mobile technology can play in co-located social interactions, and the design implications describing properties that influence interaction and collaboration between co-located users. These insights provide understandings about mobile technology for researchers and designers dealing with the colocated interaction domain. In addition, this thesis introduces a model of designing mobile technology for co-located interaction. The model intends to help researchers and designers in their early research and design process of mobile technology for co-located interaction. The model is built upon the relation between design objectives, design perspectives, dealing with limitations of mobile technology and the roles of technology in co-located interaction

Group level influence on blog's design behaviour

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.The purpose of this research is twofold. Firstly, this research aims to investigate whether the design preferences of bloggers in selected countries from different cultural backgrounds are influenced by national culture traits. The investigation involves two categories of blogs selected within a country where the bloggers share similar attributes such as language or geographical location. Secondly, simultaneously, this research intends to discover the possibility of the impact of group level influence on design preferences of bloggers who are linked together in a network through bloggers’ linkage or blogrolls. To achieve the said purposes, observations on both the global and local blogs of six selected countries are conducted using the content analysis method. This method allows this research to observe web pages and rate design preferences of bloggers via a coding system, similar to the method used to analyse documents or manuscripts to find common themes or keywords. A total of 612 blogs (306 global and 306 local) are observed for a period of nine months to identify cultural traits on design behaviour based on national culture indicators chosen from prominent literatures. To prevent a systematic error, an independent second observer was appointed and the results obtained are compared using a statistical methodology. In addition, translators were also engaged to verify that the translations are of a correct meaning and comprehension since blogs use various national languages on their web pages. The data were statistically tested using SPSS engaging in statistical analysis of frequency table, Cross-Tabulation and cluster analyses and MANOVA. Results shown that design preferences between both the global and local blogs in each country, has significant differences in most of the design indicators chosen. The findings indicate that the national culture influence on design preferences in linked networks of blogs is weakening indicating another type of influence might be in existence. The results also provide evidence that blogs in linked networks are statistically significant as a cluster or a group by themselves and are independent from one cluster to another. The research, however, studies only six countries from six different cultural dimensions. The inclusion of other countries, similar to or different from the countries under investigation, would be an added advantage. Furthermore, the use of only a single type of global blog provider (blogspot.com) in this research could be extended to other global blog providers such as wordpress.com to give fairer coverage of major and popular global blogs as well as providing a wider generalisation effect of the research findings

Contextual Social Networking

The thesis centers around the multi-faceted research question of how contexts may be detected and derived that can be used for new context aware Social Networking services and for improving the usefulness of existing Social Networking services, giving rise to the notion of Contextual Social Networking. In a first foundational part, we characterize the closely related fields of Contextual-, Mobile-, and Decentralized Social Networking using different methods and focusing on different detailed aspects. A second part focuses on the question of how short-term and long-term social contexts as especially interesting forms of context for Social Networking may be derived. We focus on NLP based methods for the characterization of social relations as a typical form of long-term social contexts and on Mobile Social Signal Processing methods for deriving short-term social contexts on the basis of geometry of interaction and audio. We furthermore investigate, how personal social agents may combine such social context elements on various levels of abstraction. The third part discusses new and improved context aware Social Networking service concepts. We investigate special forms of awareness services, new forms of social information retrieval, social recommender systems, context aware privacy concepts and services and platforms supporting Open Innovation and creative processes. This version of the thesis does not contain the included publications because of copyrights of the journals etc. Contact in terms of the version with all included publications: Georg Groh, [email protected] zentrale Gegenstand der vorliegenden Arbeit ist die vielschichtige Frage, wie Kontexte detektiert und abgeleitet werden können, die dazu dienen können, neuartige kontextbewusste Social Networking Dienste zu schaffen und bestehende Dienste in ihrem Nutzwert zu verbessern. Die (noch nicht abgeschlossene) erfolgreiche Umsetzung dieses Programmes führt auf ein Konzept, das man als Contextual Social Networking bezeichnen kann. In einem grundlegenden ersten Teil werden die eng zusammenhängenden Gebiete Contextual Social Networking, Mobile Social Networking und Decentralized Social Networking mit verschiedenen Methoden und unter Fokussierung auf verschiedene Detail-Aspekte näher beleuchtet und in Zusammenhang gesetzt. Ein zweiter Teil behandelt die Frage, wie soziale Kurzzeit- und Langzeit-Kontexte als für das Social Networking besonders interessante Formen von Kontext gemessen und abgeleitet werden können. Ein Fokus liegt hierbei auf NLP Methoden zur Charakterisierung sozialer Beziehungen als einer typischen Form von sozialem Langzeit-Kontext. Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt liegt auf Methoden aus dem Mobile Social Signal Processing zur Ableitung sinnvoller sozialer Kurzzeit-Kontexte auf der Basis von Interaktionsgeometrien und Audio-Daten. Es wird ferner untersucht, wie persönliche soziale Agenten Kontext-Elemente verschiedener Abstraktionsgrade miteinander kombinieren können. Der dritte Teil behandelt neuartige und verbesserte Konzepte für kontextbewusste Social Networking Dienste. Es werden spezielle Formen von Awareness Diensten, neue Formen von sozialem Information Retrieval, Konzepte für kontextbewusstes Privacy Management und Dienste und Plattformen zur Unterstützung von Open Innovation und Kreativität untersucht und vorgestellt. Diese Version der Habilitationsschrift enthält die inkludierten Publikationen zurVermeidung von Copyright-Verletzungen auf Seiten der Journals u.a. nicht. Kontakt in Bezug auf die Version mit allen inkludierten Publikationen: Georg Groh, [email protected]