The Four Elements of a viable PLE

In this paper, we propose and discuss four fitness features considered as essential for developing personal learning environments (PLE) that are viable and ready for appropriation

Making sense of strangers' expertise from digital artifacts

In organizations, individuals typically rely on their personal networks to obtain expertise when faced with ill-defined problems that require answers that are beyond the scope of their own knowledge. However, individuals cannot always get the needed expertise from their local colleagues. This issue is particularly acute for members in large geographically dispersed organizations since it is difficult to know ?who knows what? among numerous colleagues. The proliferation of social computing technologies such as blogs, online forums, social tags and bookmarks, and social network connection information have expanded the reach and ease at which knowledge workers may become aware of others? expertise. While all these technologies facilitate access to a stranger that can potentially provide needed expertise or advice, there has been little theoretical work on how individuals actually go about this process. I refer to the process of gathering complex, changing and potentially equivocal information, and comprehending it by connecting nuggets of information from many sources to answer vague, non-procedural questions as the process of ?sensemaking?. Through a study of 81 fulltime IBM employees in 21 countries, I look at how existing models and theories of sensemaking and information search may be inadequate to describe the ?people sensemaking? process individuals go through when considering contacting strangers for expertise. Using signaling theory as an interpretive framework, I describe how certain ?signals? in various social software are hard to fake, and are thus more reliable indicators of expertise, approachability, and responsiveness. This research has the potential to inform models of sensemaking and information search when the search is for people, as opposed to documents

Exploring the virtual space of academia

The aim of this chapter is to provide a view on how researchers present themselves in a social network specifically developed for supporting academic practices, how they share information and engage in dialogues with colleagues worldwide. We analysed data from 30,428 users who have registered on a publicly available website to study the effect of academic position, university ranking and country on people's behaviour. Results suggest that the virtual network closely mirrors physical reality, reproducing the same hierarchical structure imposed by position, ranking, and country on user behaviour. Despite the potential for bridging and bonding social capital the networks have not achieved substantial changes in structures and practices of the academic context. Furthermore, our analysis highlights the need of finding new strategies to motivate the users to contribute to the community and support equal participation, as so far the community is mainly exploited as a static website

MediaBank: Keyword Search and Tag Cloud Functionalities for a Multimedia Content Authoring Web Platform

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Web collaboration for software engineering

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Exploring online social activities for adaptive search personalization

The web has largely become a very social environment and will continue to become even more so. People are not only enjoying their social visibility on the Web but also increasingly participating in various social activities delivered through the Web. In this paper, we propose to explore a user’s public social activities, such as blog-ging and social bookmarking, to personalize Internet services. We believe that public social data provides a more acceptable way to derive user interests than more private data such as search histories and desktop data. We propose a framework that learns about users’ preferences from their activities on a variety of online social sys-tems. As an example, we illustrate how to apply the user interests derived by our system to personalize search results. Furthermore, our system is adaptive; it observes users ’ choices on search results and automatically adjusts the weights of different social systems during the information integration process, so as to refine its in-terest profile for each user. We have implemented our approach and performed experiments on real-world data collected from three large-scale online social systems. Over two hundred users from worldwide who are active on the three social systems have been tested. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our personalized search approach. Our results also show that inte-grating information from multiple social systems usually leads to better personalized results than relying on the information from a single social system, and our adaptive approach further improves the performance of the personalization solution

What and how do companies benefit from social media?:a review of seven company case studies

Abstract. Social Media (SM) has turned into our daily life in the information society. People are showing an increasing tendency to build and nurture their online social relationship on SM platforms. Organizational SM has become an important research area for both scholars and practitioners who are interested in online technologies. It is worth of studying what the researches have been done related to the SM usage in organizations, and how the organizations have utilized the SMs for own specific purpose. SM used in organization has grown continuously. Business enterprises quickly recognize the value of shared contents. They have been increasingly adopted in the workplace for decision-making, supporting corporate communication, knowledge management, facilitating communication both inside organization and the stakeholders outside organization, increasing the social capital, enhancing the brand value and promoting the marketing practice in organization, both in business to business and business to customers. Many corporations are using blogs, wikis, and social networking sites (SNS) as routine parts of their business operations. The performances of the usage of the SM can be generally classified as internal usage and external usage. All of them have the different purposes and tactics basing on various targeted users. For the thesis work, a literature review was conducted by studying the existing empirical research on the usage of SM in organizations from selected existing scientific articles. The current status of the organizational SM usage has been investigated. Two theories have been chosen which are both the affordances of SM (Visibility, Persistence, Editability, and Association) and the honeycomb functional building blocks of SM (Identity, Conversations, Sharing, Presence, Relationships, Reputation and Groups). Based on them, the case studies in seven companies have been explored, aiming to search some of the four affordances and certain amount of the seven functional blocks in organizational SM activities, and explain how they influences the organizational behaviours. Applying such two theories shows that the organizations may participant the SM platforms efficiently and effectively in various ways. Some good practises of the SM usage have been portrayed. The risks related of using SM platforms have been mentioned as well. The future potential research works related the organizational SM usage has been discussed

Factors influencing informal cross-border knowledge sharing via enterprise social software

Knowledge sharing is an essential activity for achieving a sustainable competitive advantage in today’s multinational companies (MNCs). The difficulty for an MNC’s geographically and functionally dispersed knowledge workers to informally share their knowledge across borders gives rise to enterprise social software platforms (ESSPs) and their tools to facilitate the sharing activity. In light of knowledge worker reluctance to contribute to these tools, this research analyzes determinants of an ESSP’s tools adoption and usage behaviour. This research addresses one main research question with three sub-questions. The main question investigates the factors that influence a knowledge worker’s willingness and contributions to informal cross-border knowledge sharing via an ESSP’s tools. The sub-questions explore a knowledge worker’s attitude, behavioural intention, and behavioural usage, through identifying motivational drivers and inhibiting barriers. Exploratory qualitative research was employed within this empirical study to answer the research questions through conducting nine semi-structured interviews. All interviewees were knowledge workers within one case company which provided an ESSP with the following tools exhibiting varying usage: user profiles, a wiki, and a discussion board. Content analysis of the data was structured around the theory of planned behaviour, the unified theory of the acceptance and use of technology, and social relationship theories. This resulted in the development of an integrative framework which illuminated the interrelated influence of individual, technological, and social factors resulting in a knowledge worker’s adoption and behavioural usage of an organization’s ESSP’s tools for informally sharing their knowledge across borders. In addition to individual attitudinal determinants, behavioural intention was found to be influenced primarily by the existence of technological motivational drivers in the form of perceived valued outcomes and inhibiting barriers embodied by one’s perceived effort. These were moderated by social factors related to one’s perceived social influence for each tool and the perceived support from the contextual organizational environment.fi=Opinnäytetyö kokotekstinä PDF-muodossa.|en=Thesis fulltext in PDF format.|sv=Lärdomsprov tillgängligt som fulltext i PDF-format