"Taking Care of a Fruit Tree": Nurturing as a Layer of Concern in Online Community Moderation

Care in communities has a powerful influence on potentially disruptive social encounters. Practising care in moderation means exposing a group's core values, which, in turn, has the potential to strengthen identity and relationships in communities. Dissent is as inevitable in online communities as it is in their offline counterparts. However, dissent can be productive by sparking discussions that drive the evolution of community norms and boundaries, and there is value in understanding the role of moderation in this process. Our work draws on an exploratory analysis of moderation practices in the MetaFilter community, focusing on cases of intervention and response. We identify and analyse MetaFilter moderation with the metaphor: ``taking care of a fruit tree'', which is quoted from an interview with moderators on MetaFilter. We address the relevance of care as it is evidenced in these MetaFilter exchanges, and discuss what it might mean to approach an analysis of online moderation practices with a focus on nurturing care. We consider how HCI researchers might make use of care-as-nurture as a frame to identify multi-faceted and nuanced concepts characterising dissent and to develop tools for the sustainable support of online communities and their moderators

Kids Telling Fables Through 3D Animation

Creating 3D animations has traditionally been restricted to adult experts. With the advent of easy-to-use software packages like Alice, we can now imagine animations being created by end users with no formal training in this area. Does this work in practice? Supporting real people in the successful use of complex multimedia authoring environments requires not only quality software, but also a supportive social context. What might such a supportive social context look like? In this paper, we report on a workshop in which seventeen children ages 11-12, working in pairs, were asked to make their own animations using Alice. Students were part of a language arts class studying fables, and were asked to retell a fable of their choice in 3D animation. This assignment proved to be an appropriate size and scope for the time available, skills of the students, and affordances of the software. The students found the assignment motivating, and their teacher was pleased with learning outcomes. We discuss social and technical factors that helped students create successful animated fables

Web Science & Online Communities

Presented at the Library Council Meeting on January 23, 2008 in the Wilby Room, Georgia Tech Librar

ITR collaborative research: Indexing, retrieval, and use of large motion databases

Issued as final reportNational Science Foundation (U.S.

Gender Swapping on the Internet

In text-based virtual reality environments on the Internet called MUDs, it is possible to pretend to be the opposite gender. In these virtual worlds, the way gender structures basic human interaction is often noticed and reflected upon. This paper introduces MUDs, and then presents a community discussion about gender issues that MUDs inspired. Gender swapping is one example of ways in which network technology can impact not just work practice but also culture and values