Tuesday
Jul072009
Information: interactions and impact - i3 Conference sessions (online communities)
Tuesday, July 7, 2009 at 4:15PM
I blogged earlier about the keynotes at this conference now I'll share with you my notes / thoughts from some of the sessions I attended.
Hazel Hall - shared relationships, spaces and online information behaviours: a social exchange and capital perspective (link to PowerPoint presentation)
The paper was about an academic study looking at "To what extent are online information interactions socially motivated?". The participants where level 3 model students at Edinburgh Napier University who were unable to work in placements due to their visa status which did not allow them to work while in the country. The online information interaction was to represent the work environment and working in groups. Students where marked for their blog postings and the comments they left on other students in other groups blog postings. One of the findings included that the students were not very reflective but to my mind this is not surprising as we don't teach people to be reflective we just expect them to be reflective. There was evidence of peer support and a correlation between proximity, friendship and social motivational exchange. Comments were deemed to be influenced by net etiquette / social environment and not wishing to be rude about one and another.
In other words similar issues to face to face group working.
Online student group working was also covered by another presentation Reusing Knowledge in Online Forums presented by Jim Herring on behalf of colleagues. At Charles Sturt University discussion forums are used extensively as their students are all distance learners (similar to to the Open University in the UK). The pilot study focused on reusing the knowledge captured which is seen as having 'high scholary value as well as practical merits' which could be 'shared effectively among colleagues who teach the same subject the following semester'. The findings included the identification of benefits for lecturers particularly new lecturers or lecturers taking the model for the first time as it could give them a feel for the subject, the flow and the amount of advice to give is seen as time saving. The question however was raised as whether it is information or knowledge that is captured given that what is present in the transcript of the online forums is data which needs to be used to become information added to existing knowledge to make new knowledge.
The other sessions I attended fit into either information literacy in schools or information literacy and health so I will finish of this posting with a quick mention about Malcolm Clark's session on How do People Interact with Structured E-mails in Terms of Genre and Perception. This research is still at the early stages but I was interested to hear that they had used eye tracking to see how people interact / identify different genres / types of emails. How humans recognise formatting features / layout: conference announcements; newsletters; organisational announcements; online retail orders (items bought from online suppliers) and that "it is possible to detect some clues as to the importance of purpose and form". This seems to link in with keynotes talking about selecting / bracketing raw data to help make sense and enacting that through interpretation on what worked before which they had previously retained for future use.
The other finding was that participants can / do 'skim' the shape of e-mail texts ". They were able to recognise formats that did not have any readable text in them, they had just a lot of xxxx's. if you are interested Sheila Webber's blog posting has much more on this session.
That's me for the day will do more tomorrow.
Hazel Hall - shared relationships, spaces and online information behaviours: a social exchange and capital perspective (link to PowerPoint presentation)
The paper was about an academic study looking at "To what extent are online information interactions socially motivated?". The participants where level 3 model students at Edinburgh Napier University who were unable to work in placements due to their visa status which did not allow them to work while in the country. The online information interaction was to represent the work environment and working in groups. Students where marked for their blog postings and the comments they left on other students in other groups blog postings. One of the findings included that the students were not very reflective but to my mind this is not surprising as we don't teach people to be reflective we just expect them to be reflective. There was evidence of peer support and a correlation between proximity, friendship and social motivational exchange. Comments were deemed to be influenced by net etiquette / social environment and not wishing to be rude about one and another.
In other words similar issues to face to face group working.
Online student group working was also covered by another presentation Reusing Knowledge in Online Forums presented by Jim Herring on behalf of colleagues. At Charles Sturt University discussion forums are used extensively as their students are all distance learners (similar to to the Open University in the UK). The pilot study focused on reusing the knowledge captured which is seen as having 'high scholary value as well as practical merits' which could be 'shared effectively among colleagues who teach the same subject the following semester'. The findings included the identification of benefits for lecturers particularly new lecturers or lecturers taking the model for the first time as it could give them a feel for the subject, the flow and the amount of advice to give is seen as time saving. The question however was raised as whether it is information or knowledge that is captured given that what is present in the transcript of the online forums is data which needs to be used to become information added to existing knowledge to make new knowledge.
The other sessions I attended fit into either information literacy in schools or information literacy and health so I will finish of this posting with a quick mention about Malcolm Clark's session on How do People Interact with Structured E-mails in Terms of Genre and Perception. This research is still at the early stages but I was interested to hear that they had used eye tracking to see how people interact / identify different genres / types of emails. How humans recognise formatting features / layout: conference announcements; newsletters; organisational announcements; online retail orders (items bought from online suppliers) and that "it is possible to detect some clues as to the importance of purpose and form". This seems to link in with keynotes talking about selecting / bracketing raw data to help make sense and enacting that through interpretation on what worked before which they had previously retained for future use.
The other finding was that participants can / do 'skim' the shape of e-mail texts ". They were able to recognise formats that did not have any readable text in them, they had just a lot of xxxx's. if you are interested Sheila Webber's blog posting has much more on this session.
That's me for the day will do more tomorrow.
