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Understanding and Facilitating the Development of Social Networks in Online Dating Communities: A Case Study and Model

20 August 2008 jonathanbishop 2 comments

Citation

Bishop, J. (2008). Understanding and facilitating the development of social networks in online dating communities: A case study and model. In C. Romm-Livermore, & K. Setzekorn (Eds.), Social networking communities and EDating services: Concepts and implications. New York: IGI Global.

Abstract

Online dating is a big business, allowing people from the comfort of their own home to view and read about potential mates all around the world. Different dating sites offer different services. However, it is not yet commonplace for Web sites dedicated to dating to use the social networking tools used by popular online communities, such as those that use the personal homepage and message board genres. The ecological cognition framework (ECF) provides a theoretical model regarding online dating communities’ behavior and relationship development. A model based on the ECF is proposed and provides a basis for developing online dating services that effectively support relationship development. Two investigations are presented in this chapter, one that uses a case study approach to identify and describe online dating services from the perspective of a specific case and another that assess the effectiveness of existing online dating services based on the guidelines developed from the case study. The case study provides a useful insight into the nature of social networking from the perspective of a specific case, which led to guidelines for developing e-dating systems that when evaluated showed that the most popular social networking services also score well against the criteria proposed in those guidelines.

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Understanding and Facilitating the Development of Social Networks in Online Dating Communities

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Increasing Capital Revenue in Social Networking Communities: Building Social and Economic Relationships through Avatars and Characters

1 July 2008 jonathanbishop No comments

Citation

Cite as: Bishop, J. (2008). Increasing capital revenue in social networking communities: Building social and economic relationships through avatars and characters. In C. Romm-Livermore, & K. Setzekorn (Eds.), Social networking communities and eDating services: Concepts and implications. New York: IGI Global.

Abstract

The rise of online communities in Internet environments has set in motion an unprecedented shift in power from vendors of goods and services to the customers who buy them, with those vendors who understand this transfer of power and choose to capitalize on it by organizing online communities and being richly rewarded with both peerless customer loyalty and impressive economic returns. A type of online community, the virtual world, could radically alter the way people work, learn, grow consume, and entertain. Understanding the exchange of social and economic capital in online communities could involve looking at what causes actors to spend their resources on improving someone else’s reputation. Actors’ reputations may affect others’ willingness to trade with them or give them gifts. Investigating online communities reveals a large number of different characters and associated avatars. When an actor looks at another’s avatar they will evaluate them and make decisions that are crucial to creating interaction between customers and vendors in virtual worlds based on the exchange of goods and services. This chapter utilizes the ecological cognition framework to understand transactions, characters and avatars in virtual worlds and investigates the exchange of capital in a bulletin board and virtual. The chapter finds strong evidence for the existence of characters and stereotypes based on the ecological cognition framework and empirical evidence that actors using avatars with antisocial connotations are more likely to have a lower return on investment and be rated less positively than those with more sophisticated appearing avatars.

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Building Social and Economic Relationships through Avatars and Characters

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Ecological Cognition: A new dynamic for human-computer interaction

1 October 2007 jonathanbishop No comments

Citation
Bishop, J. (2007). Ecological Cognition: A new dynamic for human-computer interaction. In: Brendan Wallace (Ed.) The Mind, the Body, and the World: Psychology after Cognitivism

Abstract
Human-computer interaction (HCI) is a field of computer science that can benefit from psychological understandings of human behaviour. During the 20th century HCI was dogged by behaviourist and cognitivist understandings of such behaviour, which led to systems that assumed that the so-called responses of actors could be reinforced through rewards, or that they responded based on schemata they had developed. A new method is needed to explain how actors are influenced by their environment and how their actions are not always consistent from one situation to the next. This approach, named ecological cognition is a new dynamic for HCI and provides a framework for understanding and influencing the behaviour of actors and for developing autonomous agents that think the way humans do.

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Ecological Cognition: A new dynamic for human-computer interaction

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Evaluation-centred Design of E-Learning Communities: A Case Study and Review

4 September 2007 jonathanbishop No comments

Citation

Bishop, J. (2007). Evaluation-centred design of E-learning communities: A case study and review. In V. Grout, D. Oram & R. Picking (Eds.), Proceedings of the second international conference on internet technologies and applications (ITA07 ed., pp. 1-9). Wrexham: University of Wales Press.

Synopsis 

This paper proposes a modification to the star lifecycle to make it suitable for designing e-learning communities.

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Evaluation-centred Design of E-Learning Communities: A case study and review

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An investigation into how the European Union affects the development and provision of e-learning services

19 July 2007 jonathanbishop No comments

This dissertation focuses on the main aspects of EU law affecting the e-learning industry and of particular interest to Jonathan were competition law and intellectual property law, including copyright and third-party intellectual property rights (TPIP) issues.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2007). An investigation into how the European Union affects the development and provision of e-learning services. LLM Thesis. Pontypridd, UK: University of Glamorgan.

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Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human-computer interaction

1 July 2007 jonathanbishop 3 comments

Citation

Bishop, J. (2007). Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human-computer interaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 23(4), 1881-1893.

Abstract

Online communities are becoming an accepted part of the lives of Internet users, although participation in these communities is dependent on the types of people that form them. Some of the online community’s members do not participate, people referred to as lurkers, whereas others who have been in the community for a long time, referred to as elders, participate regularly and support others. Understanding what drives these individuals and how they chose whether or not to participate will lead to online communities that thrive. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to describe what drives such individuals to carry out actions such as posting messages and adding content (level 1), the cognitions they use to determine whether or not to take such actions (level 2) and the means by which they go about carrying out the action in the environment (level 3). Finally, the framework is applied to the problem of encouraging members to participate by discussing the methods by which people can be persuaded to participate by changing the way they interpret their desires and their environment.

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The role of mediating artifacts in the design of persuasive e-learning systems

7 September 2005 jonathanbishop No comments

Citation

Cite as: Bishop, J. (2005). The role of mediating artefacts in the design of persuasive e-learning systems. Paper accepted for presentation at the Internet Technologies and Applications 2005 Conference, September 2005, Wrexham, UK.

Abstract

E-learning systems are becoming commonplace in the networked classroom, as educators search for new ways of engaging their learners. Traditional methods of designing these systems have focussed the tasks users are likely to complete as opposed to designing them to persuade the user to develop knowledge or learn about topics. Successful e-learning systems allow the user to interact with the environment using mediating artefacts, which are conductors for action within these environments. Mediating artefact take many forms, in Internet applications they often manifest in the form of text that offers the perceived affordance of clicking, whereas in graphical environments they are often icons that offer the perceived affordance of dragging. Many e-learning systems are based around mediating artefacts, but few of these have been designed to encourage learners to carry actions in order to meet their goals. This paper investigates how mediating artefacts can be made persuasive and suggests a scenario-based design model to aid developers in making e-learning systems persuasive and orientated around the goals of learners.

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The role of mediating artefacts in the design of persuasive e-learning systems

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The role of persuasive technology in educating heterogeneous user groups

14 July 2004 jonathanbishop No comments

Citation
Bishop, J. (2004). The role of persuasive technology in educating heterogeneous user groups. MSc Thesis, University of Glamorgan.

Executive Summary

The purpose of undertaking this project was so that the author could develop further the ideas that came out of doing his degree dissertation and joint project about developing virtual environments for enhancing real-world communities. The author’s degree dissertation and joint project led him to become interested in the role of technology in improving people lives through providing opportunities for them to change and adapt their behaviour to meet individual and collective goals and it is this desire to discover new ways of using technology to allow people to reach their potential that has directed his current research.
This Masters dissertation addresses two key issues; firstly, how technology can be used to encourage individuals to develop specific attitudes and behaviour, and secondly, how technology can be used to allow an increasingly heterogeneous population access education without their individual differences being prejudiced. To address the first issue the author decided to focus on the use of persuasive technologies, which rely on the cooperation of the user to achieve a particular goal or outcome. This builds on his degree work on recommendation systems and reputation systems and his published research into using suggestion technology, which all require the user to make individual choices, with the goal of the system being to provide users with choices and not make decisions on their behalf.

To address the second issue, the author decided to focus on two types of user groups, those that form part of the ‘Net Generation’ and those that come from bilingual communities. The Net Generation is the group of individuals born between 1977 and 1997 who are enthusiastic towards the principle of persuasion, as they have come to value technology that provides them with choices, meaning they are more likely to accept the technology. Whilst the majority of Internet users do not speak English as their first language, the majority of Websites are designed around the culture of the English language, limiting the persuasiveness of them to bilingual groups, which means that there is scope for improvement in the development of persuasive hypermedia systems that are used by bilingual users.

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MSc Dissertation (Distinction) on persuasive e-learning for minority culture learners

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Factors shaping the form of and participation in online communities

1 August 2003 jonathanbishop No comments

This article discusses the structure of virtual communities and why people participate in them. It investigates the reasons why people participate in these virtual environments and what shape they may take in the future.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2003). Factors shaping the form of and participation in online communities. Digital Matrix, 85(2003), 22-24.

Publications

The microeconomics of education and the role of government intervention

23 June 2003 jonathanbishop No comments

Investigates the market models available to central government and how intervention in these markets affects the level of choice parents have in deciding how their children are educated. Reviews the interventions by central government in the past few decades and the effect of devolved regional government on the school market. Finds that the greater amount of choice and competition that has formed part of the rhetoric of governments in the UK in the past few decades can only be achieved if all parents have perfect information. Concludes that if genuine choice is to be realised then central government will have to limit the number of non-homogeneous schools in the market and increase the amount of information available to parents through devolving responsibility for providing education to democratically accountable regional assemblies.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2003). The microeconomics of education and the effect of government intervention. Poliphony 151 (2003), 13-17.

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