Assessment Questions

Here's my questions for this week:

1.) Laffey, Lin and Lin discuss the term "social capital" being a "construct of social unitis, which facilitates collective action. How can we assess these actions?

2.) Ke and Hoadley discuss the differing types of online learning communities. How does the diversity in types of learning communities impact the evaluation of those online interactions?

Health & Support Groups

I found the articles this week interesting. Here's my questions:

1.) How can we ensure the quality of information in social networking?

2.) How can we encourage physicians, specialists and researchers into these pre-existing support groups to allow for quality of information?

Wk11 - Social Presence

Here's some of my questions for social presence:

1. Gunawardena (1995) concludes that “social presence [can be] a potentially significant factor in improving instructional effectiveness in both traditional and communications technology mediated distance classes” (p. 164). How can this be applied to online classes that have limited avenues for social presence such as blackboard?


2. How does social presence influence classroom behavior online? Do people’s personalities show themselves online?

Fictional Narrative!

Here's the link to my fictional narrative:

Fictional Narrative

Wk10 - Trust and Reputation

Here's my questions for this week:

1.) With regards to last week's article "A Day Without Facebook" and this week's articles on trust, how trusting are you with your personal information on the web? Do you post a phone number? Do you have a "locked" profile?

2.) Currently, facebook has restructured it's Terms of Use and Privacy Policies and is attempting to use a "town hall" approach to rewriting it's terms of use and privacy policies with over 10,000 members in each group. They have also created a bill of rights for facebook group which has nearly 93,000 members. This being said, does the social network define the rules and norms of the community in social networking sites or are those rules and norms simply set within a broader rule base that the technology creates have set in place? Do we trust those rules inantely because we believe they know what they're doing?

Wk9 - Community & Participation

I hope everyone had a great break! Here's my questions for this week:

1. Gray’s article (2004) discusses informal learning in an online community of practice. How can we apply the idea of a professional community of practice to a network in a K-12 school and would they be beneficial?

2. The article “A Day Without Facebook” is dated Sept. 12, 2006. It has to do with the feed system facebook created and the lack of response from an oligarchic facebook management. Currently, that feed system is still in use. More recently, facebook changed their online privacy policy and had a similar reaction. In response to this, facebook created an all-community system for reviewing a bill of rights for users and a new privacy policy. It seems that an important aspect of a community is the established rules or norms for that community. How then, should social networks determine their user or community’s rule structure or norms or should the social network dictate them to the users and those that don’t like it can leave?

Wk8 - Friendship and Relationship

Here's my questions for this week. They both have a similar underlying theme:

1. Many of the readings today compared face-to-face interactions with online interactions and how relationships are formed in both comparatively. Is this a fair comparison for a medium that is by nature relationship building (face-to-face) verses a medium that was intended to share information?
2. Should there be a different standard for online interactions and relationships because of the lack of non-verbal communication and personal interaction?