We use fine-grained longitudinal data of user activities in a leading enterprise software vendor’s Internet-enabled community network to explore knowledge contribution and exchange patterns among countries. We measure knowledge contribution using data on 1.8 million forum discussion threads involving more than 276,000 active users from 224 countries over the period of 2004 2010. We find that a ...

In this paper, we highlight a concern with using online discussion for learning. We argue that there is a lack of technological support for the development of personalised knowledge representation for most online discussion forums. Analyses of existing discussion forums suggest that there is a range of collective knowledge representation mechanisms which support a group or a community of learne...

A number of software environments have been developed as media to support collaborative knowledge building, typically featuring a Web-based threaded discussion facility. We have recently developed such a system, known as WEBGUIDE. The distinctive feature of this system is support for structuring collaboration and knowledge construction with personal, group and comparison perspectives. While pil...

The aim of the current study was to investigate whether L2 dialogue shadowing practice would have an effect on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ conversation ability. For this purpose, 30 Iranian intermediate EFL learners at Padideh language center participated in the experiment of the study. The participants were divided into two groups of 15 who were assigned to the experimental and co...

Organization-bounded online communities compete as well as collaborate regarding valued member resources. Membership overlap creates competition amongst communities because their overlapping members must choose where to allocate their limited time. But members also collaborate across communities in inter-community discussion threads to tackle common problems together. This paper examines how me...

This paper uses a short 'Christmas fairy-story for oncologists' sent by Christopher Andrewes with a 1935 letter to Peyton Rous as the centrepiece of a reflection on the state of knowledge and speculation about the viral aetiology of cancer in the 1930s. Although explicitly not intended for public circulation at the time, the fairy-story merits publication for its significance in the history of ...

With large student enrollment, MOOC instructors face the unique challenge in deciding when to intervene in forum discussions with their limited bandwidth. We study this problem of instructor intervention. Using a large sample of forum data culled from 61 courses, we design a binary classifier to predict whether an instructor should intervene in a discussion thread or not. By incorporating novel...

A typical discussion thread in an online forum spans multiple pages involving participation from multiple users and thus, may contain multiple view-points and solutions. A user interested in the topic of discussion or having a problem similar to being discussed in the thread may not want to read all the previous posts but only a few selected posts that provide her a concise summary of the ongoi...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explain some phenomena observed in the acquisition of motor skills: the loss of conscious access to knowledge of the structure of a skill and the awareness that an error has been made prior to the receipt of knowledge of results. Although there are rich descriptive accounts of skill acquisition in the literature, there are no satisfactory explanatory mo...

Recent advance in digital storage technology has enabled us to archive a large volume of video data. Thanks to this trend, we have archived more than 1,800 hours of video data from a daily Japanese news show in the last ten years. When considering the effective use of such a large news video archive, we assumed that analysis of its chronological and semantic structure becomes important. We also...