A number of conditions are necessary for the formation of ‘glue’ to keep an online community together. One condition of the ‘glue’ is community knowledge. We describe a theoretical basis and a practical representation framework on which community knowledge can be built and used. An illustrative example is given and further work noted.

this study deals with the visibility, influence rate of diffrent links in virtual universities websites. the current community research is consisted of websites of 21 non medical universities websites and 8 websites of iran medical universities. the websites have been retrieved by the use of searchin and goolge webometic tools and are downloaded on personal computers to analyze their links. the...

In this ‘work in progress’ paper, we describe research into e-learning and virtual reality at Shanghai Jiaotong University (SJTU) and Essex University respectively. We use our experience to propose a novel virtualised learning model and architecture to support online learners and teachers to visualize important learning related information that has hitherto been invisible to users of online lea...

The nation-state of Sierra Leone crumbled during the 1990s. A decade-long civil war destroyed the state and brutalized the national imaginings. Despite the lack of institutional structure, some members of its society chose to keep the nation alive through discourse on a listserv, an email forum called Leonenet. Using a multi-methodological approach that incorporated content analysis, interviews...

The success of knowledge sharing heavily depends on the capabilities of an information system to reproduce the ongoing discourses within a community. In order to illustrate the artifacts of a discourse as authentic as possible it is not sufficient to store the plain information, but also to reflect the context they have been used in. An ideal representation to do so is non-linear storytelling. ...

As participation in virtual community becomes popular, it is important to know how to encourage individuals to contribute actively and assist other members share their expertise. Through the lens of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), we explored the factors that facilitate voluntary knowledge sharing in a virtual community. We examined OCB in online gaming communities in which various b...

Sense of virtual community is an important feature of virtual communities. This study develops a sense of virtual community (SOVC) measure, building off the strengths of a widely used measure of sense of community (SOC) for face-to-face communities. Although there is overlap between the senses of community for face-to-face and virtual communities, there are significant differences. The new SOVC...

* Increasing attention has been devoted to virtual learning. In the last decade, a large number of studies in CSCL have assessed how social interaction, learning processes and outcomes in virtual settings are intertwined. Although recent research findings indicate that learners differ with respect to the amount and type of discourse contributed in virtual settings, little is known about the cau...

‘Virtual publics’ are a type of computer mediated discourse space created by using various technologies including email, the USENET, web based bulletin boards, IRC, MUDS, etc. [4]. This paper outlines on-going field research into the stress zones or boundaries to interactive virtual public discourse produced by information overload. It describes initial findings based on an examination of 2.65 ...

In organizations, change ideas are often implemented as ‘instruments of modernity’ (Giddens, 1991) prescribing a unified pattern of work, behavior and thought (Suchman, 1995). Reflecting a strong belief in the engineerability of organizational reality, they generally serve the purpose of improving management control. A cultural critique of organizational change entails investigation of how ...