Abstract
We have been experiencing an explosion in the market of social websites that aim not only to entertain us, but also to help us enlarge our professional networks, to redefine business models and capture new customers, to modify the way learning and teaching are performed, among others. So far, little research has been done on what drives individuals to contribute to online communities, as there is not enough empirical evidence to validate well-established models. In this research we propose to design, develop and test a set of principles and functionalities a virtual community should have in order to attempt to achieve a high degree of activity by its members. We will focus, at first, on the particular case of educational virtual communities. We would like our results to cover more of the scenarios and area regardless of its content and context.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Alexa: The Web Information Company (February 15, 2009), http://www.alexa.com
Figallo, C.: Hosting Web Communities: Building Relationships, Increasing Customer Loyalty and Maintaining a Competitive Edge. John Wiley & Sons, Chichester (1998)
Wellman, B., Gulia, M.: The Network Basis for Social Support: A Network is More than the Sum of its Ties. In: Wellman, B. (ed.) Networks in the Global Village, pp. 83–118. Westview Press, Boulder CO (1999)
Butler, B.: Membership Size, Communication Activity and Sustainability: A Resource-Based Model of Online Social Structures. Information Systems Research 12(4), 346–362 (2001)
Bishop, J.: Increasing Participation in Online Communities: A Framework for Human-Computer Interaction. Computers in Human Behavior 23, 1881–1893 (2007)
Preece, J., Nonnecke, B., Andrews, D.: The Top Five Reasons for Lurking: Improving Community Experiences for Everyone. Computers in Human Behavior 20, 201–223 (2004)
Kim, A.J.: Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities. Peachpit Press, Berkeley (2000)
Vassileva, J.: Motivating Participation in Peer to Peer Communities. In: Petta, P., Tolksdorf, R., Zambonelli, F. (eds.) ESAW 2002. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 2577, pp. 141–155. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Miller, K., Fabian, F., Lin, S.-J.: Strategies for Online Communities. Strategic Management Journal 30, 305–322 (2009)
Wang, Y., Fesenmaier, D.: Understanding the Motivation of Contribution in Online Communities: An Empirical Investigation of an Online Travel Community, Illinois (2001)
Konow, R., Tan, W., Loyola, L., Pereira, J., Baloian, N.: Using Recommender Systems to Improve Revenues from Advertising in e-Content Sites (2010)
Davies, J., Graff, M.: Performance in e-Learning: Online Participation and Students Grades. British Journal of Educational Technology 36, 657–663 (2005)
Preece, J., Shneiderman, B.: The Reader-to-Leader Framework: Motivating Technology-Mediated Social Participation. AIS Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction, 1(1), 13–32 (2009)
Janzik, L., Herstatt, C.: Innovation Communities: Motivation and Incentives for Community Members to Contribute. In: Management of Innovation and Technology, ICMIT, pp. 350–355 (2008)
Girgensohn, A., Lee, A.: Making Web Sites Be Places for Social Interaction. In: CSCW 2002 Proceedings of the 2002 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, New York (2002)
Koh, J., Kim, Y.-G., Butler, B., Bock, G.-W.: Encouraging Participation in Virtual Communities. Communications of the ACM 50 (2007)
Brandtzaeg, P., Heim, J.: User Loyalty and Online Communities: Why Members of Online Communities are not Faithful. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment, Brussels (2007)
Arguello, J., Butler, B., Joyce, E., Kraut, R., Ling, K., Rosé, C., Wang, X.: Talk to Me: Foundations for Successful Individual-Group Interactions in Online Communities. In: Proceedings of CHI 2006, Montreal (2006)
Beenen, G., Ling, L., Wang, X., Chang, K., Frankowski, D.: Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities. In: CSCW 2004, Chicago (2004)
Cheng, R., Vassileva, J.: User Motivation and Persuasion Strategy for Peer-to-Peer Communities. In: Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii (2005)
Cheng, R., Vassileva, J.: Design and Evaluation of an Adaptive Incentive Mechanism for Sustained Educational Online Communities. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 16, 321–348 (2006)
Luford, P., Cosley, D., Frankowski, D., Terveen, L.: Think Different: Increasing Online Community Participation Using Uniqueness and Group Dissimilarity. In: CHI 2004, Vienna (2004)
Burke, M., Marlow, C., Lento, T.: Feed Me: Motivating Newcomer Contribution in Social Network Sites. In: CHI 2009, Boston (2009)
Tedjamulia, S., Olsen, D., Dean, D., Albrecht, C.: Motivating Content Contributions to Online Communities: Toward a More Comprehensive Theory. In: Proceedings of the 38th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Hawaii (2005)
http://edtech.kennesaw.edu/intech/cooperativelearning.html (last consulted on February 26, 2011)
Trentin, G.: Networked Collaborative Learning: Social Interaction and Active Learning. Chandos Publishing, Oxford (2010)
Baker, E.L., Mayer, R.E.: Computer-Based Assessment of Problem Solving. Computers in Human Behavior 15, 269–282 (1999)
Reeves, T.C.: Alternative Assessment Approaches for Online Learning Environments in Higher Education. Journal of Educational Computing Research 23, 101–110 (2000)
Sluijsmans, D., Martens, R.: Performance Assessment in Integrated e-Learning. In: Jochems, W., Van Merriënboer, J., Koper, R. (eds.) Integrated E-Learning: Implications for Pedagogy, Technology & Organization, pp. 39–50. Routledge Farmer, London (2004)
Lebrun, M.: Des Technologies pour Enseigner et Apprendre. De Boeck Université, Brussels (2007)
Lebrun, M.: E-Learning pour Enseigner et Apprendre. De Boeck Academia Bruylant, Louvain-la-Neuve (2005)
Vonderwell, S., Zachariah, S.: Factors that Influence Participation in Online Learning. Journal of Research on Technology in Education (2005)
Gutierrez, F.: Développement de Fonctionnalités de type Réseau Social pour l’Apprentissage Mobile – Étude de Cas sur l’Application Parlez-vous Chinois? In: Engineering Internship report at Centre d’Appui aux Pratiques d’Enseignement, Ecole des Mines de Nantes, Ecole Centrale de Nantes, Nantes (2010)
Laghos, A.: E-Learning Communities. In: Zaphiris, P., Siang Ang, C. (eds.) Social Computing and Virtual Communities, pp. 69–89. Taylor and Francis Group, Boca Raton (2010)
Porter, J.: Designing for the Social Web, pp. 21–40. New Riders, Berkeley (2008)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gutierrez, F., Baloian, N., Zurita, G. (2011). Boosting Participation in Virtual Communities. In: Vivacqua, A.S., Gutwin, C., Borges, M.R.S. (eds) Collaboration and Technology. CRIWG 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6969. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23801-7_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-23801-7_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-23800-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-23801-7
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)