A number of conditions are necessary for the formation of ‘glue’ to keep an online community together. One condition of the ‘glue’ is community knowledge. We describe a theoretical basis and a practical representation framework on which community knowledge can be built and used. An illustrative example is given and further work noted.

As the number of online programmes on offer in higher educational settings, continue to increase, there is a wealth of research evidence which highlights the benefits to be gained from teaching and learning through virtual learning environments and online communities. Past reports on the positive influence online communities have on both socialization and learning outcomes recognizes the value ...

Online communities are changing how companies and non-profits innovate, lower costs, tap talent, and realize new socio-economic opportunities. In this paper, online communities are predicted to be an important resource in open innovation processes, based on the emerging online community trend of sharing and collaboration among non-professional users. However, in order to take full advantage of ...

Much effort has been expended in creating online spaces for people to meet, network, share and organize. However, there is relatively little work, in comparison, that has addressed creating awareness of online community activities for those gathered together physically. We describe our efforts to advertise the online community spaces of CHIplace and CSCWplace using large screen, interactive bul...

As online health communities (OHCs) grow, users find it challenging to properly search, read, and contribute to the community because of its overwhelming content. Our goal is to understand OHC users’ needs and requirements for better delivering large-scale OHC content. We interviewed 14 OHC users with interests in diabetes to investigate their attitudes and needs towards using OHCs and 2 OHC ad...

Purpose: While most literature concerning knowledge sharing examines it as an organizational method for innovation and value creation, this paper considers online knowledge sharing as an individual behavior decision embedded in a virtual community. We attempt to explore which sharing behavior can help individual participants gain a better position in an online community, improving social status...

As online communities are becoming more and more relevant to business, it is critical to understand why individuals are motivated to contribute content longitudinally. In this paper, we draw on existing literature on motivation and technology characteristics to conceptualize a model of longitudinal content contribution. We view longitudinal content contribution phenomenon as a recursive process...

Learning through social interactions (Online communities)

Increasingly, online systems depend on user contributions such as posts, ratings, tags, and comments. Many of these systems wish to encourage broader participation or the contribution of higher quality content. In this doctoral consortium paper, I present past work and propose future work on understanding user motivations to contribute online and on the use of personalization technology and inc...

Educators have traditionally found professional development opportunities difficult to pursue for a myriad of reasons. From a lack of relevance, to the difficulties presented by the challenges of time and place, professional development has often been an elusive goal. However, the advent of technological innovations in the area of communication technology is seen as a potential solution to thes...