ASIST2006: Virtual Communities and Social Networks: The Impact of Blogs and Online Community of Social Engagements

Virtual Communities and Social Networks: The Impact of Blogs and Online Community of Social Engagements
Monday 10am

Will Health Practitioners Blog?
Dr. Deborah Swain

Web Log and Community of Practice
- Pilot study to see if used
- If they share explicit and tacit knowledge
- If blogs fit ina public health informatics framework
- If leads to medical error collection and process improvements

23 student nurses, 1 month, hospital learning environment, blog on reserved space server with security

Self organizing
- Support, please (students working and have families)
- Challenging patients
- Job searching
- Medications
- NCLEX
- Patient rights

Qualitative Data Analysis
Weekly analysis, classification.
Comments providing support
Posts about getting comfortable with the blogging tool

Verification
- repeated pattern of information flow towards knowledge sharing
- temporary CoP

Validate
- promote error reporting
- apply lessons learned
- protect privacy (v. v. important for trust and knowledge sharing)
- ensure integrity

The Political Blogosphere in 2004
Scott Robertson
Drexel University


Cross-Cultural Issues in Blogging
Quiping Zhang
Drexel

Work and personal environments
One of the biggest challenges of teams is cross-cultural communications, yet HCI research has a real western bias.

2 Studies are there any cultural differences on
- trust in blogs by revealing personal information
- corporate blogs: contents and management styles

Study 1
- national culture effect vs. virtual community effect
- what is trust? They defined it as willingness to reveal self-reported personal information
- Hypothesis: bloggers in the US will reveal more personal information than bloggers from Korea and China.
- Held constant the blog site because some sites have their own culture
- Cultural characteristics of the site interface, available fields in user profile, and sample of user profiles (mapping of Hofsted’s matrix)

Study 2
- why do people blog in corporations
- do people from different countries but in the same corporation blog differently?
- Cohen (2005) reasons to blog in corporate environment (establish expertise, create alternative media, extend corporate communications, build community)
- Looked at google us and google china blogs

Overview
- big cultural differences in personal blogs, little cultural differences in corporate blogs

Social Networks & Virtual Communities
Suliman Hawamdeh
University of Oklahoma




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