Dorine Andrews
The changing employment environment of the 1990's is a precursor to what
will happen in the first 10 years of the new millennium. The baby boom
generation, those born between 1946 and 1964, are the first, but not the
last cohort to become multiple career professionals. It is also the most
painful experience for this group. Previous generations have had a single
career experience. As a result, there are few accepted models on how to
shift successfully and fewer still support systems for people to use while
they are in the process. In addition, the marketplace has yet to recognize
the value of older, multi-careered individuals.
There is an opportunity to create and deliver needed advisory and
community-building services and resources to these career changers via a
combination of Internet and seminar based services. The Internet services,
although littered with job posting and "career path" websites, focuses on
finding jobs within a chosen career field. The little information and
support there is is scattered and fragmented and, in many cases, of
questionable value.
Results from an independent study of 25 career changers has uncovered
negative reactions to use of the Internet as a discussion forum. I am able
to share these reactions and my initial thoughts regarding the design of an
on-line Internet community.
Workshop on the Design of Online Communities
Joshua Berman
Doctoral Student
I will be discussing to main themes. The first is an introduction to
our research group, Electronic Learning Communities at The Georgia
Institute of Technology. Led by Assistant Professor Amy Bruckman, ELC
focuses on applying the constructionist philosophy of education to the
design of online communities. The word "constructionism" was first
coined by Seymour Papert to describe an approach to education which
advocates learning through design and construction activities,
learning through working on personally meaningful projects. ELC
applies these educational ideas to online community design. In such
communities, participants learn in a self-motivated, peer-supported
fashion. Community members provide technical support, emotional
support, and an appreciative audience for completed work. My research
focuses on how to design environments to make this sort of learning
possible. We begin with a set of social goals we would like to
achieve--for example promoting professional community for media
researchers, or getting children excited about learning reading,
writing, and computer programming. Then we do a needs analysis through
field work with the target user population. Next, we design a first
prototype system. An iterative design cycle follows: results of
formative evaluation with users lead to changes to the system design.
Finally, we release the system to a larger population of users and do
a summative evaluation of its effectiveness. That summative evaluation
includes use of both quantitative (pre/post tests, log file analysis)
and qualitative methods (participant-observer ethnography,
clinical-style interviews).
The second theme is related to my own work. The question of what of
our heritage and culture comes with us when we go online has been
examined in depth by researchers for more than a decade now. For the
most part, the research community has viewed this as a phenomena of
networked communication, to be studied and understood. My research
builds upon this history to a more active position of what we bring
online in terms of variable scales which we might be able to
manipulate both as community designers and as members of online
societies. The question of what a cultural marker such as gender might
mean online should be at least partly the decision of community
designers, and affected by their decisions not simply in community
structure but also in interface and other areas. My research begins
with an examination of these communication media and the types of
cultural markers which are successfully and unsuccessfully transmitted
upon them. My research Is heavily influenced by constructionist
philosophies of learning. In addition to traditional ethnographic
methods for observing online communities, Amy Bruckman and I have
created a participatory collaborative learning experience to help us
understand these phenomena at the same time as online community users
across the Internet. In this software, which we call The Turing Game,
a panel of users all pretend to be a member of some group, such as a
specific gender. Some of the users, who are that gender, are trying to
communicate that to their audience. Others are trying to masquerade as
being members of that group. An audience of users tries to discover
who the true members are, by asking questions and analyzing the panel
members' answers. Currently, we are undergoing formative evaluation
and user studies in preparation for an Internet-wide premier in the
next few months.
Designing CommunitySpace, a Knowledge Resource for Voluntary Communities
of Practice
Jessica Friedman, Linda Carotenuto, Michael Fontaine,
Michael Muller, Helene Newberg, Matthew Simpson,
Jason Slusher, and Kenneth Stevenson
CommunitySpace is a system to support communities of practice within large
organizations. Communities of practice include voluntary members who share
roles and practices but work primarily in isolation or on diversified project
teams. The communities are flexible, self-governing and evolving. They may
include multiple constituencies. To accommodate these characteristics, our
design will feature a flexible, non-hierarchical document categorization scheme,
a range of member roles and responsibilities, and member- or constituency-
defined options for viewing and searching the community's store of documents.
Our work is in the design stage. Interesting design questions emerge around
usability of our categorization scheme, the community's evolution over time, and
the distribution of power among members.
A Research Toolbox for Evaluating Online Communities
Over the past few years, Online Communities have become an important
component of the Internet. Both industrial and academic researchers want
to learn more about these communities. For communities that are currently
in the planning stages, researchers want to know what the needs of the
community members will be. Why will people want to join these communities?
For communities that already are in place and populated, it is important
to examine whether the needs of the community members are being met by the
existing software tools (such as listservers and bulletin boards) and management (such as moderation).
What techniques can researchers use to learn about the present and future
community members of online communities? Some research techniques, such as
surveys and ethnography, have been adapted from use in physical communities. Some
research techniques, such as interaction logging, have been created
specifically for the networked environment. This presentation will discuss
some of the different approaches used by researchers to learn more about
online communities.
The Quickie Community - Online Courses
Drexel University runs two asynchronous (ASL) masters degree programs in
its College of Information Science and Technology (Masters in Software
Engineering, Masters in Information Systems). Students take all courses
online and communicate in chat rooms and via email. Students also do
joint projects. Unlike our on-site Masters programs, students complain
of a sense of not feeling part of the class and of being isolated. In
contrast, the on-site classes generate a strong sense of community and
students form cohort groups that continue long after the students have
left the university. One of the causes for this lack of community in
the ASL courses is believed to be the lack of additional informal
exchanges. A second cause is believed to be the missing awareness of the
other individuals' participation. We are looking for ways to build
informal exchanges into the class curricula, possibly by separate less
formal chat rooms. We are also looking for ways to stimulate awareness
of other participants, possibly by a postcards or equivalent setup.
Attendance at this workshop will hopefully generate other ideas to
improve this problem.
Blair Nonnecke
Lurkers are reported to make up a sizable proportion of many online
communities, yet little is known about their reasons for lurking, who they
are, and how they lurk. Our work focuses on lurking in email-based
discussion lists and utilizes two research methods, interviews with
discussion-list members and logging of discussion-list traffic. Preliminary
results will be discussed.
Shaping communities: Empathy, hostility, lurking, participation
Jenny Preece
My research is concerned with understanding what makes online communities function effectively. I focus on communities comprising combinations of bulletin boards, listservers and chats embedded in web sites. Together the web pages and communications software support information exchange, discussion and a sense of community. Different types of communities have different characteristics. For example, a sports community, a professional discussion group and a patient support community reveal different amounts of hostility, empathy, factual information exchange, lurking and the content of messages is different too. Using combinations of ethnography, content analysis and data logging I examine these and other issues to identify characteristics of successful online community design. By community design I distinguish between the functionality of the systems and how this functionality is delivered to users - that is, usability - and the nature of social processes, such as style of moderating, community rules, description of the communities focus etc. - that is, sociability (Preece, 2000, in press).
Much of my work has focused on support communities which are highly empathic - that is, empathic communities (Preece, 1999a). I have conducted two major studies on empathic communities. In the first study I analyzed 500 messages from an online support community for people suffering knee injuries (Preece, 1999a; Preece & Ghozati, 1998b) in order to answer the question: 'does empathy occur in this group?' I observed this community for several months prior to doing the study and was surprised to see a high level of empathy and no hostility even though there was no moderation. People seemed to know what the other person is feeling, feel what the other person is feeling; and respond compassionately ((Levenson & Ruef, 1992) p. 234). Using this definition and drawing on work on empathy (Ickes, 1993),(Etchegoyen, 1991) I was able to provide a theoretical definition for the empathic communication that I witnessed. While empathy can involve negative emotion (i.e. empathizing about anger), I focused upon positive emotions. I developed 4 other category descriptions and did a content analysis (Krippendorff, 1980) (Robson, 1993) (Weber, 1990) similar to Worth and Patrick's analysis of discussion lists (Worth & Patrick, 1997). In order to achieve good inter-researcher reliability my analysis focused on the predominant content of the message. This methodology is discussed thoroughly in a paper accepted for publication (Preece, 1999a).
I found that 44.8% of the messages were predominantly empathic, 17.4% were factual and 32.0% were personal stories. There were no hostile responses. 5.8% of the messages did not fit any of the categories and contained advertisements or announcements. These results suggest that empathy, as well as factual information exchange, is important in this community. I also found some evidence of gender-related differences in the content of the messages (Preece, 1999a). Women made more empathic comments and the men's comments were more factual, which is supported by a chi-square test (chi-square: 12.18, DF 4, p = 0.05). This result differs from research in face-to-face communication, which is inconclusive (Eisenberg et al., 1989). Although I can not be absolutely certain of the gender of the posters in this study, I was careful to categorize messages that were suspect as 'unclassified'. For example, log-in names that were unusual were discounted and all the messages were reviewed in context to look for signs of gender masking or swapping. Having observed this community for several months prior to doing the study I am confident of this approach but because gender swapping is common online (Bruckman, 1994; Turkle, 1995), further studies are needed in which the gender of posters is known before drawing hard conclusions.
In a follow-up exploratory study of 100 bulletin board and Usenet communities (Preece & Ghozati, 1998a) (Preece, 1999b) we investigated the following questions:
2000 messages in total were analyzed, 20 from each community. All the communities were open and did not impose membership regulations. 24 were moderated, 42 were not moderated and 34 could not be classified for moderation. Approximately half were bulletin board communities and the other half were Usenet groups. This is a small sample from the thousands of communities that now exist online, and twenty messages is a tiny slice of the activity going on in each community, but our results help to give a broader picture of online communication. 81% of the communities contained some empathic messages. Over half of the messages in 18% of the communities were empathic.
Although empathic communication was present in all but 19/100 communities, it was much stronger in most of the patient and emotional support communities than in other communities. 78% of patient and emotional support communities have five or more empathic messages, whereas only 7% of the other communities have this many empathic messages. Only 1/19 communities in which no empathy occurred is a patient support community. Most of the communities in which no empathic messages occurred are religious, scientific, sports and cultural communities.
Flaming, equated here with hostility, is also an expression of emotion, but it is not empathic. 36% of the communities contained at least one hostile message. Over a quarter of the messages in 8% of communities were hostile. A chi-square test comparing the types of messages sent in patient and emotional support communities with those sent in the other communities indicates that there is more empathy and less hostility in patient and emotional support communities (Chi- square: 398.55, DF 4, p = 0.001). Anecdotal evidence suggests that hostile communication is associated more strongly with unmoderated communities (Sproull & Kiesler, 1991). In general less hostility and more empathy occurred in the moderated communities, except in patient and emotional support communities, which were strongly empathic even though they contained hostile messages.
Overall, it appears that empathy is common in many communities and so is hostility. The occurrence of each is related to both the topic of interest and the presence of moderators. The surprising finding is how much empathy occurs in patient and emotional support communities regardless of whether they are moderated.
I am currently working with Dick Seabrook, Blair Nonnecke, Bruce Warr and Jonathan Lazar,
who are also attending this workshop. Dick's work is concerned with understanding the role of moderators
and developing a tool to identify flamming and spamming, which will support moderators' work. Blair's work
is concerned with understanding lurking better (Nonnecke, & Preece, 1999). How many people lurk? Why do people lurk?
How can we design systems that support lurking better as well as posting. Bruce's work is concerned with identifying patients'
needs in a medical support community and designing software to support those needs better. Jonathan is now a colleague at
Towson University, and is co-organizer of this workshop. We are working on issues for developing online surveys (Lazar and Preece, 1999), and devising
a taxonomy for describing online communities (Lazar and Preece, 1998). We also taught a graduate class in which students conducted semester-long
projects to develop an online community to support physical communities. Online communities were developed for:
Quiz Bowl, Down Syndrome Advocacy Group, undergraduates, a group of Nasa scientists, a school and anaesthesiologists.
References
Bruckman, A. (1994). Panel: Approaches to managing deviant behavior in virtual communities. Paper presented at the CHI'94 Conference Companion, Boston, MA.
Joseph Psotka
I am just getting started in creating on on-line self-instruction program
for the Army,
developing tacit knowledge self assessment and instructional programs.
The issues I confront are how to make difficult, ambiguous knowledge
accessible.
The knowledge I focus on is interpersonal knowledge: issues of dealing with
personal interactions; self awarenes; reflection; comfort with ambiguity;
sense of humor;
optimism; reading emotional interactions; managing relationships; control or
redirect
of disruptive impulses and moods; finding common ground and rapport.
I would like to discuss tacit knoweldge and its relation to usability.
University of Baltimore
dorineandrews@email.msn.com
Electronic Learning Communities and The Turing Game
College of Computing
Georgia Institute of Technology
Atlanta, GA 30332-0280
berman@cc.gatech.edu
Abstract
Lotus Development Corporation
55 Cambridge Parkway, Cambridge MA 02142 USA
jessica_friedman@lotus.com
Jonathan Lazar
Department of Computer and Information Sciences
Towson University
jlazar1@umbc.edu
Marilyn Mantei-Tremaine
Drexel University
tremaine@cis.drexel.edu
Research Assistant
Department of Information Systems
University of Maryland Baltimore County
nonnecke@umbc.edu
Information Systems Department
University of Maryland Baltimore County
1001 Hilltop Circle, Baltimore, MD 21250
Preece@umbc.edu
http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/~preece
http://www.ifsm.umbc.edu/communities/
(i) To what extent does empathic communication occur? Do the findings of our first study generalize?
(ii) Is empathy influenced by the community's focus of interest? Is the level of empathy similar in all communities, or are some communities more empathic than others?
(iii) Does the presence of a moderator appear to influence empathy in the community?
Eisenberg, N., Fabes, R.A., Schaller M., Miller, P.A. (1989) Sympathy and personal distress: Development, gender differences and inter-relations of indexes. In N. Eisenberg. Empathy and related emotional responses. Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA.
Etchegoyen, R. H. (1991). The Fundamentals of Psychoanalytic Technique. New York: Karnac Books.
Ickes, W. (1993). Empathic Accuracy. Journal of Personality, 61(587-610).
Krippendorff, K. (1980). Content Analysis: An Introduction to its Methodology. Newbury Park: Sage Publications.
Lazar, J., and Preece, J. (1998). Classification Schema for Online Communities. Proceedings of the 1998 Association for Information Systems, Americas
Conference, 84-86.
Lazar, J., and Preece, J. (1999, In Press) Designing and Implementing Web-Based Surveys. Journal of Computer Information Systems.
Levenson, R. W., & Ruef, A. M. (1992). Empathy: A physiological substrate. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 234-246.
Nonnecke, B., & Preece, J. (1999). Shedding light on lurkers in online
communities. Paper presented at the Ethnographic Studies in Real and Virtual Environments:
Inhabited Information Spaces and Connected Communities. 24-26 January. Edinburgh. (Ed.) K. Buckner. 123-128.
Preece, J. (1999a). Empathic Communities: Balancing Emotional and Factual Communication. Interacting with Computers (Accepted).
Preece, J. (1999b). Empathy Online. Journal of Virtual Reality Research and Design (accepted).
Preece, J., & Ghozati, K. (1998a). In search of empathy online: A review of 100 online communities. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 1998 Association for Information Systems Americas Conference, Baltimore, USA. 92-94.
Preece, J., & Ghozati, K. (1998b). Offering Support and Sharing Information: A Study of Empathy in a Bulletin Board Community. Paper presented at the Computer Virtual Environments, Manchester, England.
Preece, J. (2000, in press) Online Communities (A book to be published by Wiley and Sons.)
Robson, C. (1993). Real World Research. Blackwell: Oxford and Cambridge.
Turkle, S. (1995). Life on the Screen. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Weber, P. W. (1990). Basic Content Analysis. Newbury Park, London: Sage.
US Army Research Institute
psotka@ALEXANDRIA-EMH2.army.mil