The general available tools for analyzing interactions in online discussion forums appear to be insufficient to characterize groups of medium/large dimensions, as they are limited to provide general information of participation, access statistics and message posting. Our research contributes for analyzing and characterizing asynchronous online interactions applying the Social Network Analysis m...

The Internet provides a new digital opportunity for realizing democracy in public administration, and this study raises a central question: What factors determine public officials’ acceptance of the practice of digital democracy on government Web sites? We focused on online policy forums among many practices of digital democracy. To gauge public officials’ behavioral intentions to use online po...

There is a growing number of courses delivered using e-learning environments and their online discussions play an important role in collaborative learning of students. Even in courses with a few number of students, there could be thousands of messages generated in a few months within these forums. Manually evaluating the participation of students in such case is a significant challenge, conside...

This qualitative study explores how using Peer Learning Forums (PLF) in an online asynchronous computer programming course can be analyzed to derive information about Student Activity Focus (SAF) for adult Information Technology students. Three instruments are proposed to assist instructors classify questions posted by students on these forums, obtain easy quantitative measures of their SAF, an...

Three models of expert-public interaction in science and technology communication are central: the dissemination model (often called the deficit model), the dialogue model, and the participation model. These three models constitute a multi-model framework for studying science and technology communication and are often described along an evolutionary continuum, from dissemination to dialogue, an...

this research was conducted to determine and study the profile of participants, the contexts and the mechanisms of public participation. the methodology was survey and respondents were 150 of experts of department of environment of iran. sampling was random and mail questionnaire was used for data collection. the questionnaire used a 5-point scale to explore experts statements related to extent...

this study examines iranian agricultural researchers’ attitudes regarding collaboration with extension workers and the variables associated with the researchers’ attitudes. data were obtained using a questionnaire developed by agricultural research centers of charmahal and bakhtiari, isfahan, safiabad and khuzestan in 1998. the findings re-vealed that the researchers’ attitudes towards collabor...