How e-Learning Experience Enhances the Social Presence in Community of Practice

The chapter presents a study made in order to find out how the e-learning experience enhances the social presence in the community of practice. The study was carried out for the online master degree programme in project management, delivered by the Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest. The main research method was a survey and the research instrument was a questionnaire. Statistics and data mining were applied. Statistics was applied to check hypothesis and quantify the correlation significance. Due to the large number of the variables and the indirect relationships, the analysis paths become very complex and it would be extremely difficult to manage the analysis workflow. So, the data mining approach was chosen. As a theoretical framework and analytical perspective for this research, Wenger’s theories of learning in Community of practice (CoP), and the social presence model of Garisson et al., are applied. The study revealed that the characteristics of the online social presence in learning environments enhanced the students’ interest for CoPs. Another finding of this study is that for project management area there is not a significant correlation between the learning domain and that of the CoPs chosen to get involved. The reason is that most of the project personnel hold a first degree in an area other than project management.

Coordinating Nomadic Evaluation Practices by Supporting the Emergence of Virtual Communities

The research and development on spoken dialog systems embraces technical, user-centered and business-related perspectives. It brings together stakeholders belonging to distinct job families, therefore prone to different traditions and practices. When assessing their contributions, as well as the final solution, they conduct very nomadic evaluation protocols. As a result, the field is eager to set up norms for evaluation. Contributions abound in this way. However, despite standardization exercises, we believe that the absence of common conceptual foundations and dedicated “knowledge creation spaces” frustrates the effort of convergence. The chapter therefore presents an application framework meant to rationalize the design of evaluation protocols inside and across project teams. This Multi Point Of VieW Evaluation Refine Studio (MPOWERS) enforces common models for the design of evaluation protocols. It aims at facilitating, on the one hand, the individual evaluator-users task and, on the second hand, the emergence of (first virtual, then maybe real) communities of practice and multidisciplinary communities of interest. It illustrates how implementing shared knowledge frameworks and vocabulary for non-ambiguous asynchronous discussions can support the emergence of such virtual communities.

Towards a Participative Platform for Cultural Texts Translators

Provided as a participative Web platform, our software is designed as a collaboration and debate place for scholars around the world working on the same opus, author, time or genre. At the end of the chapter, this design is confronted with the observation of a face-to-face working session.

Identification vs. Self-Verification in Virtual Communities (VC)

Identity-related processes have been identified as important in explaining virtual community (VC) member behavior as well as informing system design of VCs. In particular, the two distinct identity processes of self-verification and identification have been identified and investigated separately, portrayed as two distinctive or contradictory identity processes with different practical implications. This chapter compares and reconciles these two theoretical perspectives in explaining VC participation. Based on a critical and comprehensive review of prior literature, the author identifies three major theoretical gaps that suggest how VC research and management can be advanced through an identity perspective. Finally, the chapter is concluded by discussing key implications of applying identity perspectives in VC research and future research agenda.

Virtual Communities in a Services Innovation Context

This chapter focuses on both the activities of the telecoms’ innovators (i.e. actors of the innovation) and the emergence of some “service communities” which are interesting facets of virtual communities. These innovators are part of a remote and inter-professional network which forms a “design community”. They are involved in the telecom operators’ design process (opportunities research, service design, development, deployment and market launch). During the first stage, this community has to describe customers’ services situations, discover lacks and opportunities and find some ideas of adapted solutions. Theoretical and professional difficulties have been noted during this key step. The main problem is related to the concept of service which is a multidimensional and still poorly understood object. Based on the service literature and the emergent field of Service Science, we propose a theoretical framework and a semi-formal semantic method to describe, co-model (through a mereotopological ontology of assembled and interconnected scenes) and simulate (through an animation of each scenario) the targeted Services Systems. These Services Systems are configurations of dynamic/processual entities that reveal not only the service field of experiences but also the actors’ performances within different spatiotemporal situations.

An Integrated Methodology to Detect the Evolution of Virtual Organizational Communities

The proposed methodology has the potential to enable the analysis of virtual communities’ overall composition, evolution and social structure, characteristics and organizational behavior of the “project related sub-communities”, informal members’ roles and their contribution to the development of project’s task.

The Creation and Management of Online Brand Communities

This chapter intends to identify, describe and analyse the main issues concerning their creation and effective management.

Virtual Community Building and the Information Society

This paper reports the results of an investigation into the life cycle model needed to develop information systems for groups of people with fluid requirements. For this purpose, we developed a modified spiral model and applied it to the analysis, design and implementation of a virtual community for a group of researchers and organizations that collaborated in a research project and had changing system requirements. The virtual knowledge community was dedicated to support mobilization and dissemination of evidence-based knowledge produced by the Disability Rights Promotion International Canada (DRPI-Canada) project.

Freedom, Control, Security

Internet Governance is concerned with the organisation, control, and strategic development of the Internet. It is a prominent and widely debated topic Furthermore, from the operational perspective, administrative control and technical operation of the Internet are crucially relevant issues for the global dissemination of information, online virtual communities and the global economy. Therefore political and technological aspects and considerations are interconnected and cannot be separated. Key Internet operation and maintenance organisations such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) are stakeholders in the process of defining the scope and agenda of future Internet governance with significant implications for virtual communities and online services. These developments have a major impact and are omnipresent in the operation of the Internet with additional implications regarding Internet security and control aspects inside Internet groups and communities. Governance and security are issues motivated by the need of protection - protection from from perceived chaos and instability, real physical or symbolic violence or even terrorism. However the question of who governs and secures the Internet against such threats remains an open issue. Furthermore it must be asked who will protect us from security. These issues are discussed from different perspectives at different scales. The Botnet case study further demonstrates how control is distributed both horizontally and vertically in keeping with contemporary forms of governance and security, reflected in the technical infrastructures of the Internet itself.

Semantically Linking Virtual Communities

A Virtual Community can be defined as a group of people sharing interests and making use of electronic forms of communication for exchanges. The shared interests might be with respect to a topic or a domain of knowledge, but it might also be related to a task. With the advent of virtual communities, there is a growing need for providing methods to link these communities together in a meaningful way. In this chapter, we shall describe the usage of semantic technologies for enhancing community portals and connecting heterogeneous virtual community sites. We propose a framework for semantically interlinked virtual communities called SIVC that can be used for information structuring, export and information dissemination. We present the SIVC ontology which combines terms from vocabularies that already exist with new terms needed to describe the relationships between concepts in the domain of virtual community.