Researching trust in Wikipedia

As the use of collaborative online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia grows, so does the need for research on how users evaluate its credibility. In this paper we compare three experimental approaches to study trust in Wikipedia, namely think aloud, eye-tracking, and online questionnaires. The advantages and disadvantages of each method are discussed. We conclude that it is best to use multiple methods when researching information trust, as each single one of the discussed methods alone does not give all possible information

Collaboration and motivation in an online learning environment: students’ perceptions of collaborative activities and attitudes towards online learning

The report about distance learning in higher education in Portugal (2009) states that only a small percentage of HE enrolments are in DL courses, that the demand for the modality is growing, and that the Portuguese research in DL needs development, to support innovation in the modality. This study aimed to identify the collaborative activities that the 122 students enrolled in Masters’ courses between 2009-2012, in two Portuguese Universities, considered more motivating, their preferred type of assignment, the tools’ perceived ease of use, the social and cognitive aspects of teamwork, the tutor’s influence on teamwork and preferred team organization. The results indicate that the students feel comfortable participating, interacting and debating and that some collaborative activities such as designing projects, simulations, problem-based activities, discussions and written reports are more motivating than others. The results also show that the students have positive attitudes towards online learning, that online trust takes time to develop, that both face-to-face meetings and videoconference increase trust, though time flexibility is a practical advantage of online collaboration and that the way that collaborative assignments are designed can facilitate or hinder adequate collaboration

Digital trust and peer-to-peer collaborative consumption platforms : a mediation analysis

This paper investigates the nature of digital trust in the context of P2P collaborative consumption platforms. We have analyzed data from the website Trustpilot.com (N=5,606), survey data from users of the online sharing platform Airbnb (N=232), and data retrieved from an online experiment conducted among current non-users of a fictitious online sharing platform (N=462). The findings reveal that trust in P2P collaborative consumption platforms (Airbnb, Lyft, and Uber) is lower than trust in P2P exchange first generation platforms (Ebay), as well as large online retail services and non-P2P platforms (Walmart, Zappos, Amazon). Furthermore, we find that the three trust-building management measures: ‘reliable insurance cover’, ‘simultaneous reviews’, and a ‘large network: many offers worldwide’ had a positive effect on ‘trust in the platform provider’. The findings confirm the hierarchical nature of the two-fold trust construct, meaning that ‘trust in the platform provider’ has a positive effect on the ‘trust in peers’ sharing on this platform. A mediation analysis reveals that ‘trust in the platform’ fully mediates all statistically significant effects of trust-building measures on the ‘trust in peers’ variable

A review of technologies for collaborative online information seeking: On the contribution of collaborative argumentation

In everyday life, people seek, evaluate, and use online sources to underpin opinions and make decisions. While education must promote the skills people need to critically question the sourcing of online information, it is important, more generally, to understand how to successfully promote the acquisition of any skills related to seeking online information. This review outlines technologies that aim to support users when they collaboratively seek online information. Upon integrating psychological–pedagogical approaches on trust in and the sourcing of online information, argumentation, and computer-supported collaborative learning, we reviewed the literature (N = 95 journal articles) on technologies for collaborative online information seeking. The technologies we identified either addressed collaborative online information seeking as an exclusive process for searching for online information or, alternatively, addressed online information seeking within the context of a more complex learning process. Our review was driven by three main research questions: We aimed to understand whether and how the studies considered 1) the role of trust and critical questioning in the sourcing of online information, 2) the learning processes at play when information seekers engage in collaborative argumentation, and 3) what affordances are offered by technologies that support users’ collaborative seeking of online information. The reviewed articles that focused exclusively on technologies for seeking online information primarily addressed aspects of cooperation (e.g., task management), whereas articles that focused on technologies for integrating the processes of information seeking into the entire learning processes instead highlighted aspects of collaborative argumentation (e.g., exchange of multiple perspectives and critical questioning in argumentation). Seven of the articles referred to trust as an aspect of seekers’ sourcing strategies. We emphasize how researchers’, users’, and technology developers’ consideration of collaborative argumentation could expand the benefits of technological support for seeking online information.Peer Reviewe

Community building and virtual teamwork in an online learning environment

In the world of OTIS, an online Internet School for occupational therapists, students from four European countries were encouraged to work collaboratively through problem based learning by interacting with each other in a virtual semi-immersive environment. This paper aims to explore the issues that there was little interaction between students from different tutorial groups and virtual teamwork developed in each of the cross cultural tutorial groups. Synchronous data from European students was captured during tutorial sessions and peer booked meetings and evidence suggests that communities of interest were established. It is possible to conclude that collaborative systems can be designed, which encourage students to build trust and teamwork in a cross cultural online learning environment. </p

A Close Look at Trust Among Team Members in Online Learning Communities

Trust is one of the important factors either fostering or damaging students’ online teamwork learning experience. Building trust among team members has become a necessary step for a successful collaboration experience. The purpose of the article was to understand students’ learning and teamwork experiences and further to investigate the relationships of learner-centered instructions, team trust, and social presence in an online learning community. Also, this article adds to the research on the role of social presence in promoting cognitive and affective trust. The results indicated there were positive correlations between learner-centered instructions and trust, between learner-centered instructions and social presence, and between trust and social presence. The study could provide suggestions for instructors teaching online courses for the implementation of learner-centered instructions and the importance of creating a social presence and building trust for students in a collaborative online learning environment

Discourses Influencing OU Students' Participation In, and Engagement With, Online Collaborative Learning

Constructivist learning theories have inter-subjectivity at their core, and collaborative learning, where learners work together to build knowledge, is widely considered good pedagogy. In distance learning, collaboration usually occurs online. The Open University includes online collaborative learning across the curriculum, but there is evidence of non-participation, and some students report they do not wish to collaborate. There is little published data on student attitudes towards collaborative learning. This study investigated Open University students' talk and practice around online collaborative learning, and placed it in the context of learning discourses within the University and elsewhere. It was conducted using focus groups, quantitative analysis of social presence during online collaborative learning activities, discourse analysis of University scholarship texts, and evaluation of policy and practice in UK education. Identified issues included lack of trust in other students, cost-benefit analysis including expectation of extrinsic reward through assessment, and reluctance to both share knowledge and value knowledge of other students. Collaborative activities were viewed as discrete tasks to be completed, and to demonstrate transferable skills rather than as learning processes. There was little social presence during the activities, which it is argued indicates lack of engagement with the community. It is suggested that presenting knowledge as bounded within a tightly defined and assessed curriculum conflicts with the exploratory nature of collaborative learning, and can discourage student participation and engagement. There is also conflict between the employability agenda and collaboration as a constructive learning tool. It is recommended that learning collaboratively is presented as an ethos rather than as discrete, formal, product-focused and assessed activities. Group trust and cohesion should be fostered. These recommendations are not limited to the Open University or to online learning

Two Esays on Trust in Supply Chain Management

In this dissertation, I propose that trust is an important yet under-studied concept in supply chain relationships both upstream in a Business-To-Business (B2B) context and downstream in a Business-To-Consumer (B2C) context. In the first essay, I investigate the evolution of trust in buyer-supplier relationships in a VMI setting. Supply chain management literature is rich in pointing to the benefits generated by collaborative supply chain arrangements, however recently the dark side of these collaborative relationships has been reported as well. To the best of our knowledge, our study is the first to bring in a new dimension - "length of the relationship" to these research models. Using survey data collected from distributors that use VMI, we find that longer relationships are associated with lower levels of distributor trust in the manufacturer. This erosion of trust over time is fully mediated by the distributors' experience of psychological contract violation. Our findings demonstrate that good inventory performance may not be sufficient to maintain trust in VMI relationships, but regular communication between parties, as well as nonverbal documented agreements, may also be needed to maintain trust. In the second part of the dissertation, I study the effectiveness of third-party trust seals that have emerged as a prominent mechanism to enhance trust in B2C online markets. Despite their common use by practitioners, systematic research studies of the effectiveness of trust signals are scarce. Exploiting a unique dataset of over a quarter million transactions across 493 online retailers, this study empirically measures the value and effectiveness of trust seals on the likelihood of purchase by shoppers. The dataset is collected from a randomized field experiment by a large trust seal provider, which enables us to infer the causal impacts of the presence of a trust seal. It is found that the presence of the online trust seal increases the odds of completion of purchase. I further find that online trust seals serve as partial substitutes for both shopper experience and seller size, which makes the seal more useful for first time visitors at a web site and also for smaller online retailers. Interestingly, the effect of the number of trust seals is subject to diminishing marginal returns, such that the presence of additional seals does not necessarily increase cart completion rates

An improved model for trust-aware recommender systems based on multi-faceted trust

As customers enjoy the convenience of online shopping today, they face the problem of selecting from hundreds of thousands of products. Recommender systems, which make recommendations by matching products to customers based on the features of the products and the purchasing history of customers, are increasingly being incorporated into e-commerce websites. Collaborative filtering is a major approach to design algorithms for these systems. Much research has been directed toward enhancing the performance of recommender systems by considering various psychological and behavioural factors affecting the behaviour of users, e.g. trust and emotion. While e-commerce firms are keen to exploit information on social trust available on social networks to improve their services, conventional trust-aware collaborative filtering does not consider the multi-facets of social trust. In this research, we assume that a consumer tends to trust different people for recommendations on different types of product. For example, a user trusts a certain reviewer on popular items but may not place as much trust on the same reviewer on unpopular items. Furthermore, this thesis postulates that if we, as online shoppers, choose to establish trust on an individual while we ourselves are reviewing certain products, we value this individual’s opinions on these products and we most likely will value his/her opinions on similar products in future. Based on the above assumptions, this thesis proposes a new collaborative filtering algorithm for deriving multi-faceted trust based on trust establishment time. Experimental results based on historical data from Epinions show that the new algorithm can perform better in terms of accuracy when compared with conventional algorithms

A metrology-based approach for measuring the social dimension of cognitive trust in collaborative networks

This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10111-018-0483-1[Abstract]: This paper addresses the measurement of the social dimension of cognitive trust in collaborative networks. Trust indicators are typically measured and combined in literature in order to calculate partners’ trustworthiness. When expressing the result of a measurement, some quantitative indication of the quality of the result—the uncertainty of measurement—should be given. However, currently this is not taken into account for the measurement of the social dimension of cognitive trust in collaborative networks. In view of this, an innovative metrology-based approach for the measurement of social cognitive trust indicators in collaborative networks is presented. Thus, a measurement result is always accompanied by its uncertainty of measurement, as well as by information traditionally used to properly interpret the results: the sample size, and the standard deviation of the sample