Turnover in online communities is very high, with most people who initially post a message to an online community never contributing again. In this paper, we test whether the responses that newcomers receive to their first posts influence the extent to which they continue to participate. The data come from initial posts made by 2,777 newcomers to six public newsgroups. We coded the content and ...

This study shows an initial direction of research where online behaviour is linked to offline behaviour of health consumers. Although no significance where found between online medical resources, it is stipulated that people are influenced by online medical information about their (possible) diseases or symptoms. Medical care providers should be aware of consumers that are heavily using the Int...

This paper discusses the chances and risks of self-presentation for atattachment and knowledge exchange in online communities. We distinguished between, on the one hand, extensive and individualizing self-presentation that enhances the chance to get in contact and facilitates interpersonal attraction between community members and, on the other hand, focused self-presentation that highlights the...

Despite attempts to encourage greater teacher collegiality, the privacy of the classroom persists. Online communication tools offer opportunities for teachers to overcome these boundaries in professional communities of practice. This study of two cohorts of preservice teachers sought to determine if they were successful in building community in class and online and to examine factors in the too...

Online communities have become important places for users to share information. In this context, the work described in this article aims to analyze computational methods that could allow us to identify users with the highest expertise levels on a specific knowledge domain in an online community. In this study the authots extracted data from a Java discussion group from an online community Faceb...

The idea of integrating users into a co-design process as part of a mass customization strategy is a promising approach for companies being forced to react to the growing individualization of demand. Compared to the rather huge amount of literature on manufacturing and information systems for mass customization, only little research discusses the role of the customer within the co-design proces...

The learning assessment in e-learning contexts is one of the latest challenges for educational technology researchers. One of the main issues to be addressed is the definition of dimensions that should be used to measure the learning effectiveness. In this perspective, the research work aims at defining the engagement indicators useful to assess the active participation of students in social le...

There has been much recent interest in the development of tools to foster remote collaboration and shared creative work. An open question is: what are the guidelines for this process? What are the key socio-technical preconditions required for a geographically distributed group to collaborate effectively on creative work, and are they different from the conditions of a decade or two ago? In an ...

Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games (MMORPGs) create large virtual communities. Online gaming shows potential not just for entertaining, but also in education. This research investigates the use of commercial MMORPGs to support second language teaching. MMORPGs offer virtual safe spaces in which students can communicate by using their target second language with global players. Usin...

Online communities are islands of people and topics that are not interlinked. Complementary discussions exist on disparate systems but it is currently difficult to exploit the available distributed information. A Semantically Interlinked Online Community (SIOC) can enable efficient information dissemination across communities by creating an ontology that will model concepts identified in discus...