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Online communities
âOur online community provides a dynamic forum for you to discuss current topics and concerns with the wider education community.â
This quote is taken from the Teachernet website [ ], but could be claimed to apply to any number of education sites. Increasingly, online content is being complemented by with opportunities for readers to interact with each other or participate in debate. This article will look at the proliferation of such âonline communitiesâ. It will consider how they might be used to support teachers and school managers, how they might be most effectively used and how âvirtualâ communication complements and overlaps with the âreal worldâ. Finally it challenges the very notion of this dichotomy.
What then is an online community? Simply it is community, a collection of people, who are communicating or working together online. Often the term is used to describe the software or online space â âClick here to enter our communityâ â but if it is a true âcommunityâ then it must involve a defined membership, however loose that definition
Loyalty in Online Communities
Loyalty is an essential component of multi-community engagement. When users
have the choice to engage with a variety of different communities, they often
become loyal to just one, focusing on that community at the expense of others.
However, it is unclear how loyalty is manifested in user behavior, or whether
loyalty is encouraged by certain community characteristics.
In this paper we operationalize loyalty as a user-community relation: users
loyal to a community consistently prefer it over all others; loyal communities
retain their loyal users over time. By exploring this relation using a large
dataset of discussion communities from Reddit, we reveal that loyalty is
manifested in remarkably consistent behaviors across a wide spectrum of
communities. Loyal users employ language that signals collective identity and
engage with more esoteric, less popular content, indicating they may play a
curational role in surfacing new material. Loyal communities have denser
user-user interaction networks and lower rates of triadic closure, suggesting
that community-level loyalty is associated with more cohesive interactions and
less fragmentation into subgroups. We exploit these general patterns to predict
future rates of loyalty. Our results show that a user's propensity to become
loyal is apparent from their first interactions with a community, suggesting
that some users are intrinsically loyal from the very beginning.Comment: Extended version of a paper appearing in the Proceedings of ICWSM
2017 (with the same title); please cite the official ICWSM versio
Using Wikis to Create Online Communities
A wiki allows anyone the ability to take part in the creation and editing of web content. With its simplified text-formatting rules that anyone can easily learn, it truly puts experienced web designers and web novices on equal footing. In public libraries, where the technological skills of employees can range from high to non-existent, wikis can allow everyone the ability to develop the website. The resulting website would reflect the imagination and good ideas of the entire organization, not just a select few with the requisite "tech-savvy." The possibilities for what libraries can do with wikis are endless. At their least, they are spaces for quick and easy collaborative work. At their best, they can become true community resources that can position the library as an online hub of their local community
Distributed leadership, trust and online communities
This paper analyses the role of distributed leadership and trust in online communities. The team-based informal ethos of online collaboration requires a different kind of leadership from that in formal positional hierarchies. Such leadership may be more flexible and sophisticated, capable of encompassing ambiguity and rapid change. Online leaders need to be partially invisible, delegating power and distributing tasks. Yet, simultaneously, online communities are facilitated by the high visibility and subtle control of expert leaders. This paradox: that leaders need to be both highly visible and invisible as appropriate, was derived from prior research and tested in the analysis of online community discussions using a pattern-matching process. It is argued that both leader visibility and invisibility are important for the facilitation of trusting collaboration via distributed leadership. Advanced leadership responses to complex situations in online communities foster positive group interaction and decision-making, facilitated through active distribution of specific tasks
Toward a Quantitative Analysis of Online Communities
In flexible learning environments there has been an increased focus on developing resources that promote and facilitate the emergence of online communities. The formation of, and active participation in, a learning community has been suggested to facilitate the learning process (Rovai, 2002; Palloff & Pratt, 1999). Current literature examining the formation and development of online communities has predominantly centred on the qualitative analysis of posted messages (within an asynchronous discussion forum) as evidence for community attainment and sustainment (Brook & Oliver, 2003; Hew & Cheung, 2003). The search for key words and phrases is conducted regardless of timing and position within the threaded discussion. Hence, analysis of the postings often occurs in a manner that de-contextualises the discourse throughout the delivery of a subject (Misanchuk & Dueber, 2001). Furthermore, as analysis is limited to a few disparate units of study, an overall picture of the extent to which the online communities formed in individual units are supporting the strategic goals of the university is not formed. Investment in online technologies and development of learning and teaching strategies is conducted at an enterprise level. However, current methodologies evaluating the development and sustainment of online communities have been focussed at a localised level. This paper proposes a scaleable quantitative approach to identify the degree of learner interactions occurring in specific subject-based forums for further qualitative analysis. It is proposed that the examination of data derived from the wider University context better positions and informs staff undertaking subject-based forums in order to align with University strategic goals
Semantic Variation in Online Communities of Practice
We introduce a framework for quantifying semantic variation of common words
in Communities of Practice and in sets of topic-related communities. We show
that while some meaning shifts are shared across related communities, others
are community-specific, and therefore independent from the discussed topic. We
propose such findings as evidence in favour of sociolinguistic theories of
socially-driven semantic variation. Results are evaluated using an independent
language modelling task. Furthermore, we investigate extralinguistic features
and show that factors such as prominence and dissemination of words are related
to semantic variation.Comment: 13 pages, Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on
Computational Semantics (IWCS 2017
Life in the "Matrix": Human Mobility Patterns in the Cyber Space
With the wide adoption of the multi-community setting in many popular social
media platforms, the increasing user engagements across multiple online
communities warrant research attention. In this paper, we introduce a novel
analogy between the movements in the cyber space and the physical space. This
analogy implies a new way of studying human online activities by modelling the
activities across online communities in a similar fashion as the movements
among locations. First, we quantitatively validate the analogy by comparing
several important properties of human online activities and physical movements.
Our experiments reveal striking similarities between the cyber space and the
physical space. Next, inspired by the established methodology on human mobility
in the physical space, we propose a framework to study human "mobility" across
online platforms. We discover three interesting patterns of user engagements in
online communities. Furthermore, our experiments indicate that people with
different mobility patterns also exhibit divergent preferences to online
communities. This work not only attempts to achieve a better understanding of
human online activities, but also intends to open a promising research
direction with rich implications and applications.Comment: To appear at The International AAAI Conference on Web and Social
Media (ICWSM) 201
Measuring quality, reputation and trust in online communities
In the Internet era the information overload and the challenge to detect
quality content has raised the issue of how to rank both resources and users in
online communities. In this paper we develop a general ranking method that can
simultaneously evaluate users' reputation and objects' quality in an iterative
procedure, and that exploits the trust relationships and social acquaintances
of users as an additional source of information. We test our method on two real
online communities, the EconoPhysics forum and the Last.fm music catalogue, and
determine how different variants of the algorithm influence the resultant
ranking. We show the benefits of considering trust relationships, and define
the form of the algorithm better apt to common situations
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