BuddyPress is still in beta testing, but seems destined to be a standard product. It applies a set of plugins to WordPress MU (the system we used for SISATSpace) to extend its social networking capabilities. The result has an Elgg-like feel (different look). Temple University's Fox School of Business has installed an instance. Perhaps we should look at BuddyPress for the next generation of CCO?

Which brings me to another HICSS-42 paper. This one reports the development and use of a social networking system for IBM employees called Beehive. Beehive was designed to facilitate "people sensemaking" within the company. It has only a small subset of users so far, but it seems to have enabled connections between employees who would not have otherwise connected. I like some of the features of the system such as "top 5" lists and free-form profiles.  

It seems like we have a sister lab at the University of Hawai’i. The Laboratory for Interactive Learning Technologies (LILT) directed by Daniel D. Suthers has a mission statement not unlike that of SL Squared. The paper that Suthers and a couple of his students presented at HICSS-42 clearly focuses on one of the key issues that SL2 has been studying. That is, how can we create linkages between students (and others) beyond those developed as a result of being in the same class. The authors of the paper refer to this as inter-course space (although my preference would have been the less pejorative inter-class space). The authors (on page 1 of their paper) state that they designed a system called discourse “to support individual courses while also allowing for serendipitous discovery of other persons, ideas and resources in the larger social network.” This sounds very much like one of the key goals of CCO, doesn’t it? They refer to the potential outcome as “bridging socio-technical capital” and they report findings to show that the system can produce such outcomes, including socially-derived value (what means participation in a discussion), creating a strong social network (which is not purely created by individual to individual(s) contact), and finding spontaneous associations (which are between people who are not “assigned to the same workspace”). I think it would be a great idea to begin dialogue to perhaps create some level of association with Suthers and LILT.

I have identified 17 papers from HICSS-42 that I think should be of interest to lab members. Since these papers will eventually be available to us through IEEE Explore, I have taken the liberty of posting the PDFs to the Files space of the SL Squared community (in the HICSS-42 folder). I have also created a page which summarizes the information about these papers and links the paper titles to the files as well as authors to web sites where you can find additional information about them. I will be blogging some notes about some of the papers, and hopefully others will contribute. I will link the blog entries from the summary page notes. You may want to do the same if you create a blog entry about another paper.

http://www.universitybusiness.com/viewarticle.aspx?articleid=1168

 

Meeting notes for 2008-2009 will be/are available under "Pages".

To those who follow such matters, i have uploaded my dissertation proposal (click here), which i hope to defend in the upcoming weeks...

Feel free to critique my work, rate this blog (based on my work), etc.  

Enjoy. 

This is just a preliminary blog entry to post the code for two new plug-ins for Elgg. Of course, i am aware that Elgg goes live with version 1.0 in a matter of weeks, but for those interested in using the plug-in with older versions of Elgg, here is the code. In the upcoming weeks, i plan to release the code on the Elgg open source community.

rate_my_blog plug-in (click for src code)

1. Rate Blogs on a 5-star scale
Provides Elgg users with the capability to rate other blog posts
    * Users must be logged into the site
    * Users cannot rate their own images

2. View Ratings
Provides Elgg users with the capability to view how others have rated blogs across the site
    * Users do not need to be logged into the site to view blog ratings

recommender plug-in (click for src code)

1. Requires rate_my_blog plug-in

2. Provides recommendations with the recommendation plug-in

3. Uses Pearson's constrained correlation coefficient to determine strength of recommendation

 

I have been reading some papers and learned a new concept called "swift trust" and its importance on the success of a temporary team to achieve its goals.I was wondering if anyone heard this term before or read an intersting paper about it related to wiki.

 

I am interested in looking at my anchored discussion research from social network perspective. I was wondering if anyone has conducted a social network analysis in a collaborative learning environment. Social network analysis basically says that the cohesion of a collaborative group, group members' roles, and power relations influence the outcome of learning. So my idea is to investigate whether anchored discussion could influence these elements for a better collaborative learning environment.

Summary of:

Boyd, Danah; "Autistic Social Software", The Best Software Writing I, Apress (2005) pp. 35-45.

Danah Boyd is a Ph.D. student in Judith Donath's Social Media Group at the MIT Media Lab.  Her argument should be familiar: it's the agile software methodology manifesto from the perspective of social software, detailing why current design methodology does not work.  Seems like an indictment of positivist design of social software.

The author claims that the way that social software (Friendster, LinkedIn, etc.) is designed to be used models how autistic people or people with Asperger's Syndrome are taught to engage in social interactions: programmatically. "Step by step, we dissect social affect and try to formalize it so that these kids can understand the world" (p. 3). Current social software codifies social interaction in much the same way, but this does not fit anyone's actual needs, and in fact people will typically try to find ways around the built in social interaction rituals (p. 4-5), if they do not abandon the product altogether.

The paper suggests that designers should design social software around how people actually interact (using a user-driven iterative design methodology (p. 6)) instead of rigidly modeling poorly understood behaviors and offering the resultant product to people to use.