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...

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.

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...

The establishment of an online community is widely held as the most important prerequisite for successful course completion and depends on an interaction between a peer group and a facilitator. Beaudoin reasoned that online students sometimes engage and learn even when not taking part in online discussions. The context of this study was an online course on webbased education for a Masters degre...

This paper will explore the development of online learning communities among postgraduate students at Deakin University who were studying while working. The main objective of the research project being discussed here was to identify impediments to the development of online communities of learning and to suggest how these may be overcome so that students could benefit from the enhancements that ...

The goal of this chapter is to introduce the reader to online learning communities, to define and categorize online communities, as well as to present the process, functionality and rules of online learning communities. It also discusses the particular characteristics of the tools and methods that are currently used for supporting online learning communities. It presents a twofold classificatio...

In this paper we report our efforts to elicit an understanding of drivers and barriers for participation in a Web2.0 online community platform to support the unique collection of virtual collaboration requirements inherent in inter-organization, cross-cultural, and cross-discipline team environments that comprise the Atlantis community. Atlantis is a grant program to stimulate and fund the orga...

With learning being a process closely connected to sociability, learning on the web is in many cases accompanied and promoted by the creation and maintenance of online communities. Even though today’s web-based learning environments have drastically evolved and now incorporate techniques from other domains and application areas (such as web mining, AI, user modelling, and profiling), setting up...

An exploratory study of students’ engagement in online learning and knowledge building is presented in this paper. Learning in an online community, composed of students (pre-service teachers) and experts (experienced in-service schoolteachers and academics), is the study’s primary focus. Students’ interaction and knowledge discourse structures, arising from individual readings of academic paper...