14,500 research outputs found
Cloudworks: social networking for learning design
Why do some social networking services work and others fail? Can we apply the best of Web 2.0 principles to an educational context? More specifically can we use this as a means of shifting teaching practice to a culture of sharing learning ideas and designs? Can we harness the potential of technologies to create more engaging learning experiences for students? These are the key questions this paper addresses. We describe how we are using the concept of 'object-orientated social networking' to underpin the creation of a social networking tool, Cloudworks, for sharing learning ideas and designs
A Storm in an IoT Cup: The Emergence of Cyber-Physical Social Machines
The concept of social machines is increasingly being used to characterise
various socio-cognitive spaces on the Web. Social machines are human
collectives using networked digital technology which initiate real-world
processes and activities including human communication, interactions and
knowledge creation. As such, they continuously emerge and fade on the Web. The
relationship between humans and machines is made more complex by the adoption
of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices. The scale, automation,
continuous sensing, and actuation capabilities of these devices add an extra
dimension to the relationship between humans and machines making it difficult
to understand their evolution at either the systemic or the conceptual level.
This article describes these new socio-technical systems, which we term
Cyber-Physical Social Machines, through different exemplars, and considers the
associated challenges of security and privacy.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure
âWaiting for Chronicâ: Time, cannabis and counterculture in Hawaiâi
What does it mean not to wait? It is possible to live in ways which do not entail waiting? Through close examination of time and its articulations among a group of US 1960s-generation âhippiesâ and younger âdrop outsâ in a rural backwater of Hawaiâi, I argue in this paper that it is possible to live without waiting. Drawing on Beckettâs Waiting for Godot (1953) and Baba Ram Dassâ countercultural invocation to âremember, be here nowâ, I explore unexpected interruptions to anticipated temporal flows. Structured around three vignettes on failing to hitchhike, learning to do ethnographic fieldwork through stopping trying to do ethnographic fieldwork and an unexpected interruption in the supermarket, this paper builds up a picture of non-waiting in action. Located against a backdrop of waiting as temporal interruption and affective mode, I argue that this group sought to collectively disrupt the affective modes of indifference and/or frustration they grew up with in urban mainland America. Through new forms of affective engagement they became able to collectively reframe temporal interruption as existing within rather than without local temporal flows, interruptions ceased to be ruptures to temporal textures but part of their very fabric. Located within temporal flows, they did not force individuals out of a moral community of (time is money) efficient, productive citizens but reframed productivity itself in terms of producing sociality, positive affective experience and communitas. Out of a multitude of moments of not waiting, a temporal texture of American counterculture emerges
Horizontal and vertical relations: Interrogating "in/dividualism" among Christian Bidayuhs
This article addresses aspects of the dividual/individualist debate by thinking through an analogous set of ideas and practices among the Bidayuh, an indigenous group of Malaysian Borneo. When Bidayuhs began converting to Christianity in the 1950s, some missionaries contrasted their communal way of life with the âindividualismâ of the new religion. Drawing on contemporaneous ethnography and my own research, I sketch a more complex picture, showing how both pre-Christian and Christian sociality have been shaped by the shifting intersection of âin/dividualâ impulses that derive from the âhorizontalâ and âverticalâ relations in which persons are enmeshed. Tracing the trajectories of these impulses and relations from life to death and beyond, this article attempts to detach questions of in/dividualism from personhood, while arguing for the need to take seriously the variegations and affinities between different strains of Christianity and Western and non-Western socialities.Fieldwork was supported by the William Wyse, Evans, Smuts Memorial, and the Bartle Frere Memorial Funds at the University of Cambridge and a Royal Anthropological Institute Horniman/Sutasoma Award
Recommendation, collaboration and social search
This chapter considers the social component of interactive information retrieval: what is the role of other people in searching and browsing? For simplicity we begin by considering situations without computers. After all, you can interactively retrieve information without a computer; you just have to interact with someone or something else. Such an analysis can then help us think about the new forms of collaborative interactions that extend our conceptions of information search, made possible by the growth of networked ubiquitous computing technology.
Information searching and browsing have often been conceptualized as a solitary activity, however they always have a social component. We may talk about 'the' searcher or 'the' user of a database or information resource. Our focus may be on individual uses and our research may look at individual users. Our experiments may be designed to observe the behaviors of individual subjects. Our models and theories derived from our empirical analyses may focus substantially or exclusively on an individual's evolving goals, thoughts, beliefs, emotions and actions. Nevertheless there are always social aspects of information seeking and use present, both implicitly and explicitly.
We start by summarizing some of the history of information access with an emphasis on social and collaborative interactions. Then we look at the nature of recommendations, social search and interfaces to support collaboration between information seekers. Following this we consider how the design of interactive information systems is influenced by their social elements
Entropy Weight Measure Model of Online Influential Usersâ Relative Social Capital
Based on the perspectives of information resource management and social capital measurement, this paper studies how influential users acquire, accumulate, and use their social capital in social networks to explore the general rules, which enterprises use influential usersâ relative competitiveness in their topic areas of expertise to advertise precisely. The paper describes the social capital differences among influential users by introducing and calculating usersâ relative social capital. Results show that userâs social capital values in different fields are dissimilar, and the scope and intensity of social capital among different users are relative. The proposed method is proved to be effective and reasonable
"Will I always be not social?": Re-Conceptualizing Sociality in the Context of a Minecraft Community for Autism
Traditional face-to-face social interactions can be challenging for individuals with autism, leading some to perceive and categorize them as less social than their typically-developing peers. Individuals with autism may even see themselves as less social relative to their peers. Online communities can provide an alternative venue for social expression, enabling different types of communication beyond face-to-face, oral interaction. Using ethnographic methods, we studied the communication ecology that has emerged around a Minecraft server for children with autism and their allies. Our analysis shows how members of this community search for, practice, and define sociality through a variety of communication channels. These findings suggest an expansion in how sociality has traditionally been conceptualized for individuals with autism
Interpreting infrastructure: Defining user value for digital financial intermediaries.
The 3DaRoC project is exploring digital connectivity and peer-to-peer relationships in financial
services. In the light of the near collapse of the UK and world financial sector, understanding and
innovating new and more sustainable approaches to financial services is now a critical topic. At the
same time, the increasing penetration and take-up of robust high-speed networks, dependable peerto-
peer architectures and mobile multimedia technologies offer novel platforms for offering financial
services over the Internet. These new forms of digital connectivity give rise to opportunities in doing
financial transactions in different ways and with radically different business models that offer the
possibility of transforming the marketplace. One area in the digital economy that has had such an
effect is in the ways that users access and use digital banking and payment services.
The impact of the new economic models presented by these digital financial services is yet to be fully
determined, but they have huge potential as disruptive innovations, with a potentially transformative
effect on the way that services are offered to users. Little is understood about how technical
infrastructures impact on the ways that people make sense of the financial services that they use, or
on how these might be designed more effectively. 3DaRoC is exploring this space working with our
partners and end users to prototype and evaluate new online, mobile, ubiquitous and tangible
technologies, exploring how these services might be extended.Executive Summary: Drawing from Studies of Use - the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users. The UK economy has a huge dependence on financial services, and this is increasingly based on digital platforms. Innovating new economic models around consumer financial services through the use of digital technologies is seen as increasingly important in developed economies. There are a number of drivers for this, ranging from national economic factors to the prosaic nature of enabling cheap, speedy and timely interactions for users. The potential for these new digital solutions is that they will allay an over-reliance on the traditional banking sector, which has proved itself to be unstable and risky, and we have seen a number of national policy moves to encourage growth in this sector. Partly as a result of the 2008 banking crisis, there has been an explosion in peer-to-peer financial services for non-professional consumers. These organisations act as intermediaries between users looking to trade goods or credit. However, building self-sustaining or profitable financial services within this novel space is itself fraught with commercial, regulatory, technical and social problems. This document reports on the value, use and interpretation of infrastructure in digital intermediaries to their users, describing analysis of contextual field studies carried out in two retail digital financial intermediary organisations: Zopa Limited and the Bristol Pound. It forms the second milestone document in the 3DaRoC project, developing patterns of use that have arisen on the back of the technical infrastructures in the two organisations that form cases for examination. Its purpose is to examine how the two different technical infrastructures that underpin the transactions that they supportâcomposed of the back-office hardware and software, data structures, the networking and communications technologies used, supported consumer devices, and the user interfaces and interaction designâhave provided opportunities for users to realise their financial and other needs. While we orient towards the issues of service use (and its problems), we also examine the activities and expectations of their various users. Our research has involved teams from Lancaster University examining Zopa and Brunel University focusing on the Bristol Pound over approximately a one-year period from October 2013 to October 2014. Extensive interviews, document analysis, observation of user interactions, and other methods have been employed to develop the process analyses of the firms presented here. This report comprises of three key sections: descriptions of the user demographics for Zopa and the Bristol Pound, a discussion about the user experience and its role in community, and an examination of the role of usage data in the development of these a products. We conclude with final analytical section drawing preliminary conclusions from the research presented.The 3DaRoC project is funded by the RCUK Digital Economy âResearch in the Wildâ theme (grant no.
EP/K012304/1)
Histories of hating
This roundtable discussion presents a dialogue between digital culture scholars on the seemingly increased presence of hating and hate speech online. Revolving primarily around the recent #GamerGate campaign of intensely misogynistic discourse aimed at women in video games, the discussion suggests that the current moment for hate online needs to be situated historically. From the perspective of intersecting cultural histories of hate speech, discrimination, and networked communication, we interrogate the ontological specificity of online hating before going on to explore potential responses to the harmful consequences of hateful speech. Finally, a research agenda for furthering the historical understandings of contemporary online hating is suggested in order to address the urgent need for scholarly interventions into the exclusionary cultures of networked media
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