This study looked at the significance of family and local community connections in determining online community engagement amongst a sample of older people in the south of England. Four catalysts were identified which motivated engagement with local and online forms of community and these were: family, roles, loss and ‘spaces and places’. SNS use (primarily Facebook) was largely family-focussed...

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...

Identity plays a key role in virtual communities. In communication, which is the primary activity, knowing the identity of those with whom you communicate is essential for understanding and evaluating an interaction. Yet in the disembodied world of the virtual community, identity is also ambiguous. Many of the basic cues about personality and social role we are accustomed to in the physical wor...

Online communities are increasingly important to organizations and the general public, but there is little theoretically based research on what makes some online communities more successful than others. In this article, we apply theory from the field of social psychology to understand how online communities develop member attachment, an important dimension of community success. We implemented a...

We study the distribution of the activity period of users in five of the largest localized versions of the free, online encyclopedia Wikipedia. We find it to be consistent with a mixture of two truncated log-normal distributions. Using this model, the temporal evolution of these systems can be analyzed, showing that the statistical description is consistent over time.

the debate over the contribution of the internet to democracy is farfrom settled. some point to the empowering effects of online discussionand fund raising on recent electoral campaigns in the us to argue thatthe internet will restore the public sphere. others claim that the internetis just a virtual mall, a final extension of global capitalism into everycorner of our lives. this paper argues f...