• Analysis of 26 online communities (OLCs) for professional development of 1492 teachers • ‘Average’ teacher improves at least somewhat teaching skills & school subject knowledge • Room for improvement of communities; some communities function better than others • Communities with high embeddedness in offline social networks provide more benefits • Complete integration online & offline relation...

Online learning communities are an important means of sharing and creating knowledge. Online behaviors and online roles can reveal how online learning communities function. However, no study has elucidated the relationships among online behaviors, online roles, and online learning communities. In this study, 32 preservice teachers participated in an 18-week instruction program. Analyses of onli...

We have analyzed two months of log data and 100 surveys on the phone use of a Swedish online community for teenagers to investigate the mobile use of an established online service. This shows that the phone use mostly takes place during times of the day when teenagers have social time and the use is not influenced by the availability of a computer. The phone makes the community access more priv...

Teachers of primary students aged 5 – 12 years in government schools in New South Wales, Australia, are implementing curriculum planning and assessment frameworks which provide a model for the integration of the six subjects taught to primary students into one manageable teaching program. This paper discusses how 120 schools, supported by Australian Federal Government funding, are trialling the...

This paper presents a service integration model through a study of major for-profit online communities in both North America and China. Our study examines various types of communities and proposes particular means by which these communities might integrate their services with each other. Three integration strategies are identified: vertical integration, horizontal integration, and hybrid integr...

The emergence of online communities has enabled firms to monitor consumer-generated online word-of-mouth (WOM) in realtime by mining publicly available information from the Internet. A prerequisite for harnessing this new ability is the development of appropriate WOM metrics and the identification of relationships between such metrics and consumer behavior. Along these lines this paper introduc...

In recent years online and blended communities have become a popular topic among educationalists. In this paper we present a framework that supports the analysis, development and maintenance of online and blended communities. This is applied to two community case studies that differ along several key dimensions such as type of membership, the purpose of the communities, their policies and size....