research-article

Do we speak the same language?: design goals and culture clashes in an online forum for young people

Authors:

Annamari Martinviita,

Pentti LuomaAuthors Info & Claims

C&T '15: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Communities and Technologies

Pages 69 - 78

https://doi.org/10.1145/2768545.2768550

Published: 27 June 2015 Publication History

Abstract

This is a case study exploring the social scene created on a newly-developed online service for increasing the study motivation of 16--18-year-old students in vocational education in Finland. The developers wished to motivate participation by the addition of a communal chat space to engender a sense of community on the site. The analysis shows that the students appropriated the communal chat space for uses in line with their prior experience of online interaction, while the developers had based their design on a very different experience. However, the developers were able to respond flexibly to encourage interaction rather than limiting topics of conversation to those desired in the original design. As a result, the communal page could be seen to fulfil some of the expectations of the developers in unexpected ways. The case offers learning points for developers and administrators who wish to create online social spaces with a particular aim.

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Cited By

Ventä-Olkkonen LIivari NLanamäki A(2019)In sweet harmony or in bitter discord? How cultural values and stakeholder requirements shape and users read an urban computing technologyAI & Society10.1007/s00146-017-0724-534:3(455-476)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00146-017-0724-5

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Do we speak the same language?: design goals and culture clashes in an online forum for young people

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cover image ACM Other conferences

C&T '15: Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Communities and Technologies

June 2015

167 pages

ISBN:9781450334600

DOI:10.1145/2768545

Conference Chair:
Gabriela Avram
University of Limerick, Ireland
,
Program Chairs:
Fiorella De Cindio
University of Milano, Italy
,
Volkmar Pipek
University of Siegen, Germany

Copyright © 2015 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 27 June 2015

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C&T '15

C&T '15: Communities and Technologies 2015

June 27 - 30, 2015

Limerick, Ireland

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Cited By

Ventä-Olkkonen LIivari NLanamäki A(2019)In sweet harmony or in bitter discord? How cultural values and stakeholder requirements shape and users read an urban computing technologyAI & Society10.1007/s00146-017-0724-534:3(455-476)Online publication date: 1-Sep-2019
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1007/s00146-017-0724-5

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