Exploring delegate engagement with an augmented conference

We describe a qualitative study of delegate engagement with technology in academic conferences through a large- scale deployment of prototype technologies. These deployments represent current themes in conference technologies, such as providing access to content and opportunities for socialising between delegates. We consider not just the use of individual technologies, but also the overall impact of an assemblage of interfaces, ranging from ambient to interactive and mobile to situated. Based on a two-week deployment followed by interviews and surveys of attendees, we discuss the ways in which delegates engaged with the prototypes and the implications this had for their experience of the conferences. From our findings, we draw three new themes to inform the development of future conference technologies

Microblogging as a Facilitator of Online Community in Graduate Education

Part-time and distance-learning students can experience a sense of isolation from their peers and the university. Concern about this isolation and resulting student attrition has increased in the midst of explosive growth in online course enrollments. One possible solution: building a stronger sense of community within the online graduate classroom using microblogging technology such as Twitter. Unfortunately, scholars across disciplines define community in different ways with some rejecting the concept altogether in favor of other theoretical constructs. And, few scholars have examined the notion of online classroom community from an English Studies perspective exploring the rhetorical exigencies that underpin this concept. Scholars often write about online community in aspirational terms and fail to demonstrate its existence empirically (Kling and Courtright, 2003). Through the application of two existing pedagogical theories (Rovai\u27s (2002) concept of classroom community and the well-established Community of Inquiry framework) this dissertation empirically documents the existence of online classroom community in two cases studies of graduate distance-learning summer sessions. This mixed-methods research study then demonstrates that microblogging technology is capable of both supporting and facilitating the growth of that sense of online classroom community. Because it stands at the convergence of a student\u27s academic and personal interests, social media software such as Twitter—whether used as a front- or backchannel to the course—is uniquely positioned to serve both as a virtual third place and as a venue for exercising Brooke\u27s (1999) writing underlife activities and extending Mueller\u27s (2009) notions of where and how these activities can be played out in a digital context. Finally, this dissertation also offers a five-part alternative definition of online classroom community that strongly links the digital space itself with the affective/emotional concerns addressed in some other theoretical constructions of community

Yhteisöllinen tiedonrakentelu ja verkottunut asiantuntijuus Twitter-palvelussa : Case #okfest

Aims. This qualitative study explored a phenomenon of epistemic communality around a Twitter hashtag. The primary aim of the study was to explore communal epistemic production on the Twitter platform, especially in the context of a mutually shared hashtag. The study explored the peer-production of knowledge and epistemic structures in the context of a specialist domain collaborating in the open Web. The secondary aim was to explore how Twitter functions as a platform for networked expertise and as a public agora for practitioners' expert discourse. This nascent mode of cultural production leads to the development of expert cultures on Twitter and in the open Web. This creates new contexts for informal collaborative learning and cultral production potentially answering some of the competence challenges presented by the 21st century. Methods. The hashtag #okfest was launched for the 'Open Knowledge Festival' conference held in Helsinki, Finland (17–22.9.2012). The participants of the study were open knowledge practitioners who participated in the hashtag discourse of #okfest on Twitter. All public tweets containing the string '#okfest' were collected as data. Tweets were analyzed with qualitative thematic analysis exploring the epistemic contributions either included in the tweets or as hyperlinked attachments. Results and conclusions. The analysis indicated how the hashtag was appropriated to serve as a node of communal knowledge sharing beyond mere reporting from the conference. The analysis observed six themes of communal knowledge building in the hashtag space. The communal epistemic activities in #okfest were likened to the properties of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998). A network of practitioners engaging in a mutual domain creates a dynamic 'social learning system' combining social interaction with the production and dissemination of knowledge. The study yielded a novel theoretical concept of 'expert microblogging', recognized as a significant genre of cultural production in a specialist domain on Twitter and in the open Web. Finally the Twitter platform was ascertained as a site for the manifestation of cultures of networked expertise.Tavoitteet. Tämä laadullinen tutkielma tutki episteemistä yhteisöllisyyttä Twitter-palvelussa hashtag-aihetunnisteen ympärillä. Hashtag #okfest lanseerattiin Helsingissä pidetyn 'Open Knowledge Festival' –konferenssin taustakanavaksi 17–22.9.2012. Tutkielman pääasiallinen tavoite oli tutkia yhteisöllistä tiedonrakentelua Twitter-palvelussa erityisesti hashtagien ympärillä. Tutkimus kohdistui tietyn toimialan tiedolliseen vertaistuotantoon Twitterissä ja avoimessa Internetissä. Laajempi tavoite oli tutkia miten Twitter toimii alustana verkottuneelle asiantuntijuudelle ja julkisten asiantuntijayhteisöjen vuorovaikutukselle. Tämä uusi kulttuurisen tuotannon konteksti mahdollistaa verkottuneiden asiantuntijakulttuurien kehittymisen Twitterissä ja avoimessa Internetissä. Tämä luo uusia tilaisuuksia informaalille yhteisölliselle oppimiselle ja kulttuuriselle tuotannolle mahdollisesti vastaten nykyajan vaativiin osaamishaasteisiin. Menetelmät. Tutkimuksen osallistujat olivat avoimen datan ammattilaisia, jotka osallistuivat Twitterissä #okfest keskusteluun konferenssin aikana. Kaikki julkiset Twitter-viestit #okfest aihetunnisteella kerättiin aineistoksi. Viestejä analysoitiin laadullisella temaattisella analyysillä koskien niiden tiedollisia kontribuutioita joko viestiin sisältyen tai linkitettynä. Tulokset ja johtopäätökset. Tutkimustulokset osoittavat että hashtag-aihetunnisteen ympärille syntyi yhteisöllisen tiedonrakentelun ilmiö, joka oli enemmän kuin pelkkää raportointia tapahtumapaikalta. Analyysissä löytyi kuusi yhteisöllisen tiedonrakentelun teemaa jotka ilmenivät hashtag-tilassa. Yhteisöllinen tiedonrakentelu muistutti käytäntöyhteisöjen teoriaperinteen (Wenger, 1998) vuorovaikutuksen piirteitä. Asiantuntijoiden yhteisöllinen vuorovaikutus synnytti "sosiaalisen oppimisen systeemin" jossa tiedonrakentelu yhdistyi vuorovaikutukseen. Tutkimustuloksista nousi uusi käsitteellistys, asiantuntijoiden alakohtainen tiedollinen tuotanto (eng. expert microblogging). Twitter-alustalle paikantui verkottuneiden asiantuntijakulttuurien kehittyminen avoimessa verkossa

Enablers in Crisis Information Management: A Literature Review

Social media often plays a central role in crisis informatics as it is an important source for assessing, understanding, and locating crises quickly and accurately. In addition, social media enables actors to react more effectively and efficiently when managing crises. However, enablers of crisis information management have not been carved out explicitly in a systematic view. Therefore, we perform a literature review to synthesize the existing literature on crisis information management with a focus on technical enablers and their classification into the crisis-management phases. As our results show, searching for crisis informatics mostly results in social media-related publications. We found that Twitter is one of the most important technical enablers but that research on other social media platforms is underrepresented. Also, most publications center on the post-crisis phases of crisis management, leaving out the pre-crisis phases

SHARING BEHIND THE SCENES: UNDERSTANDING USER BYPASSING BEHAVIOR IN SHARING ECONOMY

Sharing economy platforms facilitate people’s sharing of underutilized resources by adding value to their users, such as reducing transaction costs and building trust. However, it is discovered by practitioners that users may actually bypass, or “disintermediate”, the platforms to strike direct deals on their own. This phenomenon motivates this research-in-progress to understand sharing economy user bypassing behaviour. Specifically, we investigate their motivations of bypassing and behavioral strategies of overcoming trust barriers. Drawing insights from disintermediation literature, we conduct a single case study on Airbnb, a renowned accommodation sharing platform. Our preliminary findings show that Airbnb hosts have non-economic motivation to bypass the platform, and they are able to overcome trust barriers through leveraging the unbundling of intermediary functions. Upon completion of the research, the study is expected to make three theoretical contributions: uncovering the loopholes in sharing economy business models, augmenting predominant economic view of disintermediation, and proposing a “spillover effect” of embedded relationship on economic action

Fostering awareness and collaboration in large-class lectures

For decades, higher education has been shaped by large-class lectures, which are characterized by large anonymous audiences. Well known issues of large-class lectures are a rather low degree of interactivity and a notable passivity of students, which are aggravated by the social environment created by large audiences. However, research indicates that an active involvement is indispensable for learning to be successful. Active partaking in lectures is thus often a goal of technology- supported lectures. An outstanding feature of social media is certainly their capabilities of facilitating interactions in large groups of participants. Social media thus seem to be a suitable basis for technology-enhanced learning in large-class lectures. However, existing general-purpose social media are often accompanied by several shortcomings that are assumed to hinder their proper use in lectures. This thesis therefore deals with the conception of a social medium, called Backstage, specially tailored for use in large-class lectures. Backstage provides both lecturer- as well as student-initiated communication by means of an Audience Response System and a backchannel. Audience Response Systems allow running quizzes in lectures, e.g., to assess knowledge, and can thus be seen as a technological support of question asking by the lecturer. These systems collect and aggregate the students' answers and report the results back to the audience in real-time. Audience Response Systems have shown to be a very effective means for sustaining lecture- relevant interactivity in lectures. Using a backchannel, students can initiate communication with peers or the lecturer. The backchannel is built upon microblogging, which has become a very popular communication medium in recent years. A key characteristic of microblogging is that messages are very concise, comprising only few words. The brief form of communication makes microblogging quite appealing for a backchannel in lectures. A preliminary evaluation of a first prototype conducted at an early stage of the project, however, indicated that a conventional digital backchannel is prone to information overload. Even a relatively small group can quickly render the backchannel discourse incomprehensible. This incomprehensibility is rooted in a lack of interactional coherence, a rather low communication efficiency, a high information entropy, and a lack of connection between the backchannel and the frontchannel, i.e., the lecture’s discourse. This thesis investigates remedies to these issues. To this aim, lecture slides are integrated in the backchannel to structure and to provide context for the backchannel discourse. The backchannel communication is revised to realize a collaborative annotation of slides by typed backchannel posts. To reduce information entropy backchannel posts have to be assigned to predefined categories. To establish a connection with the frontchannel, backchannel posts have to be stuck on appropriate locations on slides. The lecture slides also improve communication efficiency by routing, which means that the backchannel can filter such that it only shows the posts belonging to the currently displayed slide. Further improvements and modifications, e.g., of the Audience Response System, are described in this thesis. This thesis also reports on an evaluation of Backstage in four courses. The outcomes are promising. Students welcomed the use of Backstage. Backstage not only succeeded in increasing interactivity but also contributed to social awareness, which is a prerequisite of active participation. Furthermore, the backchannel communication was highly lecture-relevant. As another important result, an additional study conducted in collaboration with educational scientists was able to show that students in Backstage-supported lectures used their mobile devices to a greater extent for lecture-relevant activities compared to students in conventional lectures, in which mobile devices were mostly used for lecture-unrelated activities. To establish social control of the backchannel, this thesis investigates rating and ranking of backchannel posts. Furthermore, this thesis proposes a reputation system that aims at incentivizing desirable behavior in the backchannel. The reputation system is based on an eigenvector centrality similar to Google's PageRank. It is highly customizable and also allows considering quiz performance in the computation of reputation. All these approaches, rating, ranking as well as reputation systems have proven to be very effective mechanisms of social control in general-purpose social media.Seit Jahrzenten wird die universitäre Lehre durch Massenvorlesungen, die sich durch sehr große anonyme Hörerschaften auszeichnen, geprägt. Wohlbekannte Probleme von Massenvorlesungen sind ein sehr niedriger Grad an Interaktivität als auch eine augeprägte Passivität von Studenten, die auch durch die sozialen Rahmenbedingungen in großen Hörerschaften begünstigt werden. Dabei ist bekannt, dass eine aktive Auseinandersetzung mit dem Lernstoff für ein erfolgreiches Lernen unabdingbar ist. Eine aktive Teilnahme in Vorlesungen ist daher oft ein Ziel technologieunterstützter Vorlesungen. Ein herausragendes Merkmal von sozialen Medien ist sicherlich die Fähigkeit, Interaktionen in großen Gruppen zu ermöglichen. Soziale Medien scheinen deshalb eine geeignete Grundlage für technologie- unterstütztes Lernen zu sein. Jedoch sind allgemeine soziale Medien häufig auch mit Unzulänglichkeiten behaftet, die eine zweckmäßige Nutzung in Vorlesungen erschweren. Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich deshalb mit der Konzipierung eines sozialen Mediums genannt Backstage, das speziell für die Nutzung in Vorlesungen zugeschnitten ist. Backstage ermöglicht sowohl dozenten- als auch eine studenteninitiierte Kommunikation mit Hilfe eines Audience Response Systems und eines Backchannels. Audience Response Systeme ermöglichen die Durchführung von Quizzen in Vorlesungen, beispielsweise um Wissen abzufragen, und können so als eine technologische Unterstützung des Fragenstellen durch den Dozenten betrachtet werden. Diese Systeme sammeln und aggregieren die Antworten der Studenten und liefern in Echtzeit die Ergebnisse zurück an die Hörerschaft. Es konnte gezeigt werden, dass Audience Response Systeme effektive Mittel zur Aufrechterhaltung vorlesungsbezogener Interaktivität sind. Durch einen Backchannel können auch Studenten Kommunikation mit anderen Studenten oder dem Dozenten initiieren. Der auf Backstage verfügbare Backchannel basiert auf Microblogging, was sich über die letzten Jahre zu einem sehr beliebten Kommunikationsmedium entwickelt hat. Eine Schlüsseleigenschaft des Microbloggings ist die Kürze von Nachrichten, die aus nur wenigen Wörtern bestehen. Die knappe Kommunikationsform macht Microblogging sehr attraktiv als Backchannel für Vorlesungen. Eine vorläufige Evaluation des ersten Prototyps, die zu einem frühen Zeitpunkt im Projekt durchgeführt wurde, zeigte jedoch, dass ein konventionelles Backchannel dazu neigt, die Teilnehmer zu überlasten. Sogar der Backchannel-Diskurs einer relativ kleinen Gruppe kann schnell unüberschaubar werden. Die Unüberschaubarkeit hat ihre Ursachen in einer mangelnden interaktionalen Kohärenz, eine vergleichsweise niedrige Kommunikationseffizienz, eine hohe Informationsentropie und eine fehlende Verknüpfung zwischen Backchannel und dem Vorlesungsvortrag. Diese Arbeit untersucht mögliche Abhilfen für die genannten Probleme. So werden Vorlesungsfolien integriert, um damit den Austausch auf dem Backchannel zu strukturieren und in einen Kontext zu bringen. Die Backchannel-Kommunikation wird zudem neu konzipiert, so dass es ein kollaboratives Annotieren von Folien mit Hilfe von getypten Backchannel-Nachrichten umsetzt. Die Typisierung von Backchannel-Nachrichten dient dazu, die Informationsentropie zu reduzieren. Um eine Verknüpfung mit dem Vorlesungsvortrag herzustellen, müssen zudem Backchannel-Nachrichten an die betreffenden Stellen auf Folien positioniert werden. Die Vorlesungsfolien verbessern auch die Kommunikationseffizienz durch das Routing, so dass der Backchannel nur die Nachrichten anzeigt, die zur aktuell angezeigten Folie gehören. Weitere Verbesserungen und Anpassungen des Systems, z.B. des Audience Response Systems, werden in dieser Arbeit beschrieben. Diese Arbeit berichtet über eine Evaluation von Backstage in vier großen Vorlesungen. Die Ergebnisse sind vielversprechend. So begrüßten die Studenten den Einsatz von Backstage. Backstage erhöhte nicht nur die Interaktivität sondern trug auch zur sozialen Awareness bei, die eine Voraussetzung für eine aktive Teilnahme ist. Die Backchannel-Kommunikation war zu einem hohen Grad vorlesungsbezogen. Zudem konnte in einer weiteren Studie, die zusammen mit Pädagogen durchgeführt wurde, gezeigt werden, dass Studenten ihre mobilen Endgeräte in Backstage-unterstützten Vorlesungen mehr für vorlesungsbezogene Aktivitäten genutzt haben als in konventionellen Vorlesungen, in welchen die mobilen Endgeräte hauptsächlich für vorlesungsfremde Aktivitäten genutzt wurden. Um soziale Kontrolle auf dem Backchannel zu etablieren, untersucht diese Arbeit Rating und Ranking von Backchannel-Nachrichten. Darüber hinaus schlägt diese Arbeit ein Reputationssystem vor, das als Ziel hat, einen Anreiz für erwünschtes Verhalten auf dem Backchannel zu schaffen. Das Reputationssystem basiert auf einer Eigenvektor-Zentralität, die an Googles PageRank angelehnt ist. Es ist zu einem hohen Grad anpassbar und ermöglicht auch die Berücksichtigung von Quizleistungen in der Berechnung von Reputation. Alle diese Ansätze, Rating, Ranking und Reputationssysteme haben sich in allgemeinen sozialen Medien als sehr effektive Mittel für soziale Kontrolle erwiesen

Configuration Management of Distributed Systems over Unreliable and Hostile Networks

Economic incentives of large criminal profits and the threat of legal consequences have pushed criminals to continuously improve their malware, especially command and control channels. This thesis applied concepts from successful malware command and control to explore the survivability and resilience of benign configuration management systems. This work expands on existing stage models of malware life cycle to contribute a new model for identifying malware concepts applicable to benign configuration management. The Hidden Master architecture is a contribution to master-agent network communication. In the Hidden Master architecture, communication between master and agent is asynchronous and can operate trough intermediate nodes. This protects the master secret key, which gives full control of all computers participating in configuration management. Multiple improvements to idempotent configuration were proposed, including the definition of the minimal base resource dependency model, simplified resource revalidation and the use of imperative general purpose language for defining idempotent configuration. Following the constructive research approach, the improvements to configuration management were designed into two prototypes. This allowed validation in laboratory testing, in two case studies and in expert interviews. In laboratory testing, the Hidden Master prototype was more resilient than leading configuration management tools in high load and low memory conditions, and against packet loss and corruption. Only the research prototype was adaptable to a network without stable topology due to the asynchronous nature of the Hidden Master architecture. The main case study used the research prototype in a complex environment to deploy a multi-room, authenticated audiovisual system for a client of an organization deploying the configuration. The case studies indicated that imperative general purpose language can be used for idempotent configuration in real life, for defining new configurations in unexpected situations using the base resources, and abstracting those using standard language features; and that such a system seems easy to learn. Potential business benefits were identified and evaluated using individual semistructured expert interviews. Respondents agreed that the models and the Hidden Master architecture could reduce costs and risks, improve developer productivity and allow faster time-to-market. Protection of master secret keys and the reduced need for incident response were seen as key drivers for improved security. Low-cost geographic scaling and leveraging file serving capabilities of commodity servers were seen to improve scaling and resiliency. Respondents identified jurisdictional legal limitations to encryption and requirements for cloud operator auditing as factors potentially limiting the full use of some concepts

Different views on Digital Scholarship: separate worlds or cohesive research field?

This article presents a systematic review of the literature on Digital Scholarship, aimed at better understanding the collocation of this research area at the crossroad of several disciplines and strands of research. The authors analysed 45 articlesin order to draw a picture of research in this area. In the first phase, the articles were classified, and relevant quantitative and qualitative data were analysed. Results showed that three clear strands of research do exist: Digital Libraries, Networked Scholarship and Digital Humanities. Moreover, researchers involved in this research area tackle the problems related to technological uptake in the scholar's profession from different points of view, and define the field in different – often complementary – ways, thus generating the perception of a research area still in need of a unifying vision. In the second phase, authors searched for evidence of the disciplinary contributions and interdisciplinary cohesion of research carried out in this area through the use of bibliometric maps. Results suggest that the area of Digital Scholarship, still in its infancy, is advancing in a rather fragmented way, shaping itself around the above-mentioned strands, each with its own research agenda. However, results from the cross-citation analysis suggest that the Networked Scholarship strand is more cohesive than the others in terms of cross-citations

The Role of Social Media in Artisanal Production : A Case of Craft Beer

We present craft beer as part of an artisan industry case study that demonstrates how the use of social media creates a community narrative that engages both producer and consumer around the artisanal produce and its values. In contrast to mass drinks production, the past decade has seen a resurgence in specialist artisan ‘craft beer’ producers, making niche, high-quality products. Specifically, we examine the craft beer industry’s use of digital technologies as a way of engendering bilateral consumer engagement with their products, and how it can influence brewing practices and support in-the-field quality control. A qualitative approach, using grounded theory, was undertaken to understand the digital relationships between key stakeholders in the craft beer community, including craft brewers, retailers, bloggers, and fans, through a series of interviews, ethnographies, focus groups, and public events. Our analysis reveals future design considerations for these stakeholders, with findings supporting the design of future interactions that can further strengthen the relationship between small, artisan industries and their consumers