Information Behavior in the Social Web: An Overview of the German Educational Domain

This paper explores participative Social Information Behavior in the educational domain. The goal is to capture a picture of current information practices in the Social Web. The focus is on the “places” and the scale of the Social Web in the domain, the communication dynamics and structure of communities and the specificities, quality, pragmatics and success of communication processes. The paper describes the concept and current implementation status of an online analysis approach and system that tries to answer these questions. Furthermore, first empirical results are presented. Data indicates that participative Social Information Behavior is of relevance in the domain: The volume of openly accessible user-generated content is impressive. The basic characteristics of analyzed forums suggest that such websites resemble sustainable knowledge building communities. Pre-tests regarding the analysis of communication processes denote that generated content can often be seen as a valuable information resource.

[1]  E. Wenger,et al.  Communities of Practice: The Organizational Frontier , 2000 .

[2]  Marlene Scardamalia,et al.  Computer Support for Knowledge-Building Communities , 1994 .

[3]  Andrew Tomkins,et al.  Toward a PeopleWeb , 2007, Computer.

[4]  Kyung-Sun Kim,et al.  Social media as information source: Undergraduates' use and evaluation behavior , 2011, ASIST.

[5]  Rita Kop,et al.  Connectivism: Learning theory of the future or vestige of the past? , 2008 .

[6]  Andrea J. Hester.  Increasing collaborative knowledge management in your organization: characteristics of wiki technology and wiki users , 2010, SIGMIS-CPR '10.

[7]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  What do people ask their social networks, and why?: a survey study of status message q&a behavior , 2010, CHI.

[8]  Gilad Mishne,et al.  Finding high-quality content in social media , 2008, WSDM '08.

[9]  J. Piaget.  Judgement and Reasoning in the Child , 1962 .

[10]  L. Vygotsky.  Mind in Society: The Development of Higher Psychological Processes: Harvard University Press , 1978 .

[11]  Clay Shirky,et al.  Here Comes Everybody , 2017 .

[12]  Huan Liu,et al.  Quantifying the trustworthiness of social media content , 2011, Distributed and Parallel Databases.

[13]  Soohyung Joo,et al.  Information resource selection of undergraduate students in academic search tasks , 2012, Inf. Res..

[14]  Clay Shirky.  Tapping the cognitive surplus , 2010 .

[15]  Stefan Hrastinski,et al.  How are campus students using social media to support their studies? An explorative interview study , 2011, Education and Information Technologies.

[16]  Reijo Savolainen,et al.  Judging the quality and credibility of information in Internet discussion forums , 2011, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[17]  N. Selwyn.  Faceworking: exploring students' education‐related use of Facebook , 2009 .

[18]  Tim O'Reilly,et al.  Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On , 2009 .

[19]  Alistair Croll,et al.  Complete Web monitoring , 2009 .

[20]  Peter C. Neijens,et al.  "Highly Recommended!" The Content Characteristics and Perceived Usefulness of Online Consumer Reviews , 2011, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..