Skip to main content

Designing Social Navigation for a Virtual Community of Practice

  • Conference paper
Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment (Edutainment 2006)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 3942))

Abstract

Social navigation in a community of practice (CoP) is an approach of locating information through increased social awareness. Designing support for social navigation requires precise knowledge about the users’ needs and wishes so as to meet user participatory design methodology. User requirement definition on social navigation is, however, difficult to elicit. On the one hand, without the context of the CoP, it is hard to collect the user requirements on navigation, especially when the concept of virtual community is new to the target user group. On the other hand, to set up such a virtual community, preliminary studies on social navigation is however necessary. This paper presents the experiences how we dealt with such a chicken and egg problem. Different approaches were used: performing a theoretical study, administering an online questionnaire, observing on an existing virtual society, analyzing similar systems, prototyping, and conducting an expert walk-through.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Wenger, E.: Communities of practice learning as a social system. System Thinker 9(5) (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Wenger, E., McDermott, R., Snyder, W.: Cultivating Communities of Practice, 1st edn. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Wenger, E.: Communities of practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Kimble, C., Hildreth, P., Wright, P.: Communities of practice: Going Virtual. Idea Group Inc., pp. 220–234 (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Allen, S., Ure, D., Evans, S.: Virtual Communities of Practice as Learning Networks. In: Instructional Psychology and Technology Program, Brigham Yong University (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Dieberger, A., Dourish, P., Hook, K., Resnick, P., Wexelblat, A.: Social navigation: techniques for building more usable systems. interactions 7(6), 36–45 (2000)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Lonnqvist, P., Dieberger, A., Hook, K., Dahlback, N.: Usability studies of a socially enhanced web server. In: CHI 2000 Workshop on Social Navigation (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Dourish, P., Chalmers, M.: Running out of space: Models of information navigation. In: Cockton, G., Draper, S.W., Weir, G.R.S. (eds.) People and computer IX, Proceedings of HCI 1994. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1994)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Dieberger, A., Hook, K., Svensson, M., Lonnqvist, P.: Social navigation research agenda. In: CHI 2001 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 107–108. ACM Press, New York (2001)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  10. Forsberg, M.: A Collaborative Building for Pharmaceutical Use. Master thesis, Linkoping Institute of Technology (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Robins, J.: Affording a place: the role of persistent structures in social navigation. Information Research 7(3) (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Xu, W.: Requirement definition of social navigation in a virtual community of practice. Thesis for professional doctorate in engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Roberts, T.: Are newsgroups virtual communities? In: the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 360–367. ACM Press/Addison-Wesley Publishing Co. (1998)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Xu, W., Kreijns, K., Hu, J. (2006). Designing Social Navigation for a Virtual Community of Practice. In: Pan, Z., Aylett, R., Diener, H., Jin, X., Göbel, S., Li, L. (eds) Technologies for E-Learning and Digital Entertainment. Edutainment 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3942. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11736639_7

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11736639_7

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-33423-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-33424-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics