Learning in the Wild: Exploring the Practice of Learning in Open, Online Forums

The Internet provides many opportunities for learning from static resources to conversational spaces for questions, answers, commentary and exploration of topics of interest to participants, whether organized as Q&A sites such as Reddit, hashtag communities on Twitter, or knowledge-sharing sites such as Stack Overflow. Yet, there is limited research on how learning is happening in these spaces. This paper reviews literature and studies about learning in open, online forums to begin to synthesize what is known so far, and to set a research agenda addressing the question: How do people learn in open, online forums? The review builds on work by the author and colleagues, exploring what we refer to as ‘learning in the wild’ (in recognition of Hutchins’ “Cognition in the Wild”, and to reflect the ‘wilds’ of online forums such as Reddit). The increasing use and reach of these sites raises questions not only about what is being learned and what motivates participation in such sites, but also what kind of organization and learning practices are emerging. While it may be thought that such learning, taking place outside the bounds of institutional settings, is informal learning, the research suggests a more complicated picture, dependent on conversation, networks, membership in communities, and community practices, needing to be addressed by drawing on multiple disciplinary perspectives

Do smartphone usage scales predict behavior?

Understanding how people use technology remains important, particularly when measuring the impact this might have on individuals and society. However, despite a growing body of resources that can quantify smartphone use, research within psychology and social science overwhelmingly relies on self-reported assessments. These have yet to convincingly demonstrate an ability to predict objective behavior. Here, and for the first time, we compare a variety of smartphone use and ‘addiction’ scales with objective behaviors derived from Apple’s Screen Time application. While correlations between psychometric scales and objective behavior are generally poor, single estimates and measures that attempt to frame technology use as habitual rather than ‘addictive’ correlate more favorably with subsequent behavior. We conclude that existing self-report instruments are unlikely to be sensitive enough to accurately predict basic technology use related behaviors. As a result, conclusions regarding the psychological impact of technology are unreliable when relying solely on these measures to quantify typical usage

Building an Apparatus: Refractive, Reflective, and Diffractive Readings of Trace Data

We propose a set of methodological principles and strategies for the use of trace data, i.e., data capturing performances carried out on or via information systems, often at a fine level of detail. Trace data comes with a number of methodological and theoretical challenges associated with the inseparable nature of the social and material. Drawing on Haraway and Barad’s distinctions among refraction, reflection, and diffraction, we compare three approaches to trace data analysis. We argue that a diffractive methodology allows us to explore how trace data are not given but created through the construction of a research apparatus to study trace data. By focusing on the diffractive ways in which traces ripple through an apparatus, it is possible to explore some of the taken-for-granted, invisible dynamics of sociomateriality. Equally important, this approach allows us to describe what distinctions emerge and when, within entwined phenomena in the research process. Empirically, we illustrate the guiding methodological principles and strategies by analyzing trace data from Gravity Spy, a crowdsourced citizen science project on Zooniverse.org. We conclude by suggesting that a diffractive methodology helps us draw together quantitative and qualitative research practices in new and productive ways that allow us to study and design for the entwined and dynamic sociomaterial practices found in contemporary organizations

Characterizing Novelty as a Motivator in Online Citizen Science

Citizen science projects rely on the voluntary contribution of nonscientists to take part in scientific research projects. Projects taking place exclusively over the Internet face significant challenges, chief among them is the attracting and keeping the critical mass of volunteers needed to conduct the work outlined by the science team. The extent to which platforms can design experiences that positively influence volunteers’ motivation can help address the contribution challenges. Consequently, project organizers need to develop strategies to attract new participants and keep existing ones. One strategy to encourage participation is implementing features, which re-enforce motives known to change people’s attitudes towards contributing positively. The literature in psychology noted that novelty is an attribute of objects and environments that occasion curiosity in humans leading to exploratory behaviors, e.g., prolonged engagement with the object or environment. This dissertation described the design, implementation, and evaluation of an experiment conducted in three online citizen science projects. Volunteers received novelty cues when they classified data objects that no other volunteer had previously seen. The hypothesis was that exposure to novelty cues while classifying data positively influences motivational attitudes leading to increased engagement in the classification task and increased retention. The experiments resulted in mixed results. In some projects, novelty cues were universally salient, and in other projects, novelty cues had no significant impact on volunteers’ contribution behaviors. The results, while mixed, are promising since differences in the observed behaviors arise because of individual personality differences and the unique attributes found in each project setting. This research contributes to empirically grounded studies on motivation in citizen science with analyses that produce new insights and questions into the functioning of novelty and its impact on volunteers’ behaviors

Encounters with Authority: Tactics and negotiations at the periphery of participatory platforms

Digital participatory platforms like Wikipedia are often celebrated as projects that allow anyone to contribute. Any user can sign up and start contributing immediately. Similarly, projects that engage volunteers in the production of scientific knowledge create easy points of entry to make contributions. These low barriers to entry are a hallmark feature in digital participatory labor, limiting the number of hoops a new volunteer has to jump through before they can feel like they are making a difference. Such low barriers to participation at the periphery, or edges of participatory platforms, have presented a problem for organizational scholars as they wonder how such projects can achieve consistent results when opportunities to train and socialize newcomers are constrained by a need for low barriers. As a result, scholarship has focused on answering the question of newcomer learning and socialization by examining how newcomers make sense of their new digital workspaces rather than focus on how institutional constraints are imposed. In this research, I draw on a growing body of scholarship that pushes against the perception of openness and low barriers on digital participatory platforms to unpack the constraints on participation that newcomers confront and, in particular, to show how such constraints resemble characteristics of institutionalized newcomer onboarding tactics. To approach this question, I conducted 18 months of participant observation and conducted 36 interviews with experts, newcomers, and project leaders from the crowdsourced citizen science platform Planet Hunters and the peer produced encyclopedia, Wikipedia. I analyzed my data using a grounded theory research design that is sensitized using the theoretical technology of Estrid Sørensen’s Forms of Presence as a way to pay attention to the sociomaterial configurations of newcomer practice, attending to the actors (both human and nonhuman) that play a part in the constraints and affordances of newcomer participation. By drawing on Sørensen’s Forms of Presence, the analytical focus on the newcomer experience shifts from looking at either top-down institutional tactics of organizations or bottom-up individual tactics of newcomers to thinking about the characteristics of relationships newcomers have with other members and platform features and the effects of these relationships as they relate to different opportunities for learning and participation. Focusing on the different ways that learning and participation are made available affords the exploration of how the authority of existing practices in particular settings are imposed on learners despite the presence of low barriers to participation. By paying attention to the sociomaterial configuration of newcomer participation, my findings unpack the tactics that newcomers encounter at the periphery, or edges of participatory platforms, as well as how they find their work being included or excluded from the platform. I use the findings to develop a taxonomy of encounters that describes how newcomers can participate in a self-guided experience as the existing literature describes, but also experience moments of guided and targeted encounters. What this taxonomy of encounters suggests is that the periphery of participatory platforms can be at once an open space for exploration and experimentation but also a well-managed space where, despite low barriers to initial participation, a newcomer must negotiate what I describe as the guardrails of participation that define the constraints and affordances that shape their experience

Enhancing Understanding of Digital Traces

“How did Galileo demonstrate the veracity of the copernican view of the sun centred universe? Well, the main advances were incremental in their ability to refine glass into lenses, not very sexy, except he could use that to make his own telescopes and see the moons of Jupiter.” - Dr Steven Hyman. (Cahalan, 2019, p 283) Technological advances have repeatedly provided new tools for psychologists to conduct scientific inquiry. Theories regarding cognition, perception and behaviour have been more rigorously falsified or at least tested thanks to computers, electroencephalographs and associated big data sets. Smartphones are among the latest technologies being used for psychological research. Portable devices like these could provide unparalleled access into peoples’real-world behaviour via highly ecologically valid data. However, there are significant obstacles for psychologists to overcome before the potential of smartphones can be fully realised. Part one of this thesis documents multiple newmethodsthat concern the development of smartphone apps for psychological research and provides guidance to ensure subsequent research is compliant with open science practices while maintaining participant privacy.In part two, developed apps are used in research designsthat reveal inconsistencies between objective and self-report assessments ofsmartphone usage. Specifically, objective methodsof measuring smartphone usage reduce the associations to almost zero between ‘screen time’ and health when compared with subjective estimates. Thisfurther demonstrates how the interdisciplinary application ofsmartphone technology can transform applied psychology or at least increase the methodological rigor