This paper discusses the issue of learner participation in a net-based higher education course. With the starting point in recent educational policies formulated by the European Union and the results of an evaluation report from the Swedish Net University, I raise the question of which pedagogical aspects need to be considered in order to support active learner participation in these types of l...

The creation and maintenance of online production communities depend on the complex ecology created by the interaction of social roles, and these roles are essential for the governance of the community. This study investigates the organizational structure of one of the most notable peerproduction projects: Wikipedia. While online communities have often been depicted as ‘flat’ and egalitarian, r...

Building on the extant research on branding and social media, this study examines the nature of an online brand community as a B2B brand communication platform through netnographic analysis of the CISCO LinkedIn Group discussions. The empirical analysis yielded four distinct themes characterizing B2B brand communication within the online community that contribute to the existing theory: company...

Little is known about what causes anti-social behavior online. The paper at hand analyzes vandalism and damage in Wikipedia with regard to the time it is conducted and the country it originates from. First, we identify vandalism and damaging edits via ex post facto evidence by mining Wikipedia’s revert graph. Second, we geolocate the cohort of edits from anonymous Wikipedia editors using their ...

As online communities become increasingly popular, researchers have tried to examine participating activities in online communities as well as how to sustain online communities. However, relatively few studies have tried to understand what kinds of participants constitute online communities. In this study, we try to contribute online community research by developing “common language” to classif...

The communal benefits of online communities and SNS are enjoyed by many Internet users but remain of limited appeal to many older people. In this study we consider how a small group of older people in the South of England engage with these technologies showing their motivations and the role of existing relationships in the local community with regards to this engagement. Four catalysts are iden...

In this paper, we describe the TelM eA2002 asynchronous online community, which uses embodied characters as expressive media to communicate messages. The functionality of the system and the challenges faced in designing it are discussed. Furthermore, we present the results of its first user evaluation.

Online communities of different types have become an important part of the daily internet life of many people within the last couple of years. Both research and business have shown interest in studying the possibilities and risks related to these relatively new phenomena. Frequently discussed aspects that are tightly bound to online communities are their implications and effects on privacy issu...

This paper describes the ethnographic study performed to an online community called WiserEarth. A combination of interviews and observations were used to analyze the community’s activities and its member’s perceptions about it. The analysis of the results was performed by crossing social web concepts, the observation data and general parameters found in the interviews. The results suggest that ...

Macroeconomic forecasts are used extensively in industry and government despite the lack of accuracy and reliability. Prediction markets as a community forecasting method have begun to gain interest in academia industry alike. An open question is how to design incentive schemes and feedback mechanisms to motivate online communities to contribute and thereby increase the predictive power of the ...