Sustainable E-Learning Communities

Knowledge acquisition in E-Learning environments requires both, individualization of content, and social interaction based on relevant learning items. So far few E-Learning systems support an integrated didactic and social perspective on knowledge transfer. Intelligibility Catchers (ICs) are E-Learning components designed for establishing sustainable communities of E-Learning practice. They encapsulate didactic and communication-centered concepts for effective collaborative and reflective generation and exchange of knowledge. Due to their open nature, they can be created dynamically, for any domain and on different levels of granularity. By intertwining content and communication, context can be kept for learning and exploration, even bound to specific community members.

Virtual Communities in Health and Social Care

This chapter provides an overview and discussion of virtual communities in health and social care. The available literature indicates that a virtual community in health or social care can be defined as a group of people using telecommunications with the purposes of delivering health care and education, and/or providing support. Such communities cover a wide range of clinical specialties, technologies and stakeholders. Examples include peer-to-peer networks, virtual health care delivery and E-Science research teams. Virtual communities may empower patients and enhance coordination of care services; however, there is not sufficient systematic evidence of the effectiveness of virtual communities on clinical outcomes. When practitioners utilize virtual community tools to communicate with patients or colleagues they have to maximize sociability and usability of this mode of communication, while addressing concerns for privacy and the fear of de-humanizing practice, and the lack of clarity or relevance of current legislative frameworks. Furthermore, the authors discuss in this context ethical, legal considerations and the current status of research in this domain. Ethical challenges including the concepts of identity and deception, privacy and confidentiality and technical issues, such as sociability and usability are introduced and discussed.

Using Activity Theory to Assess the Effectiveness of an Online Learning Community

Remote, collaborative work practices are increasingly common in a globalised society. Simulating these environments in a pedagogical setting allows students to engage in cross-cultural exchanges encountered in the profession. However, identifying the pedagogical benefits of students collaborating remotely on a single project presents numerous challenges. Activity Theory (AT) provides a means for monitoring and making sense of their activities as individuals and as a collective. AT assists in researching the personal and social construction of students’ intersubjective cognitive representations of their own learning activities. Moreover, AT makes the socially constructed cultural scripts captured in their cross-cultural exchanges analysable. Students’ reflection on these scripts and their roles in them helps them better understand the heterogeneity of the cultures encountered. In this chapter Engestrom’s (1999) simple AT triangular relationship of activity, action and operation is used to analyze and provide insights into how students cooperate with each other across different cultures in a 3D collaborative virtual environment.

Research Communities in Context

This chapter examines a community of professionals, created by a government agency and charged with conducting country-wide, cross-disciplinary, and cross-sectoral research and innovation in the area of water. The analysis describes the structure of the community and places it in the context of existing project practices and institutional arrangements. Under challenging conditions, the professionals in the area recruit team members from their trusted long-term collaborators, work independently on projects, use standard communication technologies and prefer informal face-to-face contacts. Out of these practices emerge a sparsely connected community with permeable boundaries interspersed with foci of intense collaboration and exchange of ideas. In this community, professionals collaborate and exchange of ideas with the same colleagues. Both collaboration and exchanges of ideas tend to involve professionals from different disciplines and, to a lesser extent, from different sectors and locations.

Designing Practice-Oriented Interactive Vocabularies for Workflow-Based Virtual CoP

This chapter concentrates on the development of practice-specific toolkits for managing on-line practices in the context of virtual communities of practice. The authors describe two case studies in different application domains each presenting alternative but complementary insights to the design of computer-mediated practice vocabularies. The first case study describes how established practices in music performance are encapsulated in a suitably augmented music toolkit so as to facilitate the learning objectives of virtual teams engaged in music master classes. The second case study is slightly different in orientation as it seeks to establish a toolkit for engaging in new coordinative practices in the course of building information-based products such as vacation packages for tourists. This time the virtual team is a cross-organization virtual community of practice with members streamlining their efforts by internalizing and performing in accordance with the new practice. Collectively, the case studies provide insight to building novel practice-specific toolkits to either encapsulate existing or support novel practices.

Enabling Virtual Music Performance Communities

The chapter provides an overview of virtual music communities focusing on novel collaboration environments aiming to support networked and geographically dispersed music performance. A key objective of the work reported is to investigate online collaborative practices during virtual music performances in community settings. To this effect, the first part of the chapter is devoted to reviewing different kinds of communities and their corresponding practices as manifested through social interaction. The second part of the chapter presents a case study, which elaborates on the realization of virtual music communities using a generic technological platform, namely DIAMOUSES. DIAMOUSES was designed to provide a host for several types of virtual music communities, intended for music rehearsals, live performances and music learning. Our recent experiments provide useful insights to the distinctive features of these alternative community settings as well as the practices prevailing in each case. The chapter is concluded by discussing open research issues and challenges relevant to virtual music performance communities.

Socializing in the Online Gaming Community

Massive Multiplayer Online Games (MMOG) allows a large number of players to cooperate, compete and interact meaningfully in the online environment. Gamers are able to form social network with fellow gamers and create a unique virtual community. Although research has discussed the importance of social interaction in MMOG, it fails to articulate how social interaction takes place in the game. The current chapter aims to depict how gamers interact and socialize with each other in a popular MMOG, World of Warcraft. Through virtual ethnography, specific interaction patterns and communication behaviors within the community are discussed. It is concluded that the types of social interaction taken place in the gaming world is influenced by the temporal and spatial factors of the game as well as the game mechanisms.

Interaction, Imagination and Community Building at the Math Forum

This chapter draws upon contemporary social theory to make an argument about the ways that teachers create personalized communities of practice at The Math Forum, an online educational resource center. The discussion of social networks and personalized community is brought into dialogue with sociologically oriented strands of math education research to suggest that the collaborative community building work that Math Forum teachers do online allows them to not only form a learning community but allows them to overcoming tensions around mathematical identity formation which are important for advancing one’s thinking as a math teacher. The chapter discusses some of the interview data conducted with math forum teachers and the importance of that information for the future of teacher professional development and the way an online community can support teacher learning.

Social Semantic Web and Semantic Web Services

In this chapter the authors aim to portray the social aspects of the World Wide Web and the current and emerging trends in “Social Web”. The Social Web (or Web 2.0) is the term that is used frequently to characterize Web sites that feature user provided content as their primary data source and leverage the creation of online communities based on shared interests or other socially driven criteria. The need for adding more meaning and semantics to these social Web sites has been identified and to this end the Semantic Web initiative is described and its methodologies, standards, and architecture are examined in the context of the “Semantic Social Web”. Finally the embellishment of Web Services with semantic annotations and semantic discovery functionality is described and the relevant technologies are explored.

GRIDS in Community Settings

The authors have been running the second decade since the time that pioneers in Grid started to work on a technology which seemed similar to its predecessors but in reality it was envisioned totally divergent from them. Many years later, the grid technology has gone through various development stages yielding common solution mechanisms for similar categories of problems across interdisciplinary fields. Several new concepts like the Virtual Organization and Semantic Grid have been perfected bringing closer the day when the scientific communities will collaborate as if all their members were at the same location, working with the same laboratory equipment and running the same algorithms. Many production-scale standard-based middlewares have been developed to an excellent degree and have already started to produce significant scalability gains, which in the past, were considered unthinkable.