Michelle M. Kazmer
Florida State University
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Publication
Featured researches published by Michelle M. Kazmer.
Information, Communication & Society | 2008
Michelle M. Kazmer; Bo Xie
This methodological paper addresses practical strategies, implications, benefits and drawbacks of collecting qualitative semi-structured interview data about Internet-based research topics using four different interaction systems: face to face; telephone; email; and instant messaging. The discussion presented here is based on a review of the literature and reflection on the experiences of the authors in performing completed research that used those four interaction systems. The focus is on functional effects (e.g. scheduling and other logistics, data transcription and data management), as well as methodological effects (e.g. ability to probe, collecting affective data, and data representation). The authors found that all four methods of data collection produced viable data for the projects they completed, but that some additional issues arose. Five themes emerged that form the organization of the paper: (1) interview scheduling and participant retention; (2) recording and transcribing; (3) data cleaning and organizing; (4) presentation and representation of data; and (5) the detection/presentation of affective data.
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology | 2011
Besiki Stvilia; Charles C. Hinnant; Katy Schindler; Adam Worrall; Gary Burnett; Kathleen Burnett; Michelle M. Kazmer; Paul F. Marty
The production of scientific knowledge has evolved from a process of inquiry largely based on the activities of individual scientists to one grounded in the collaborative efforts of specialized research teams. This shift brings to light a new question: how the composition of scientific teams affects their production of knowledge. This study employs data from 1,415 experiments conducted at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) between 2005 and 2008 to identify and select a sample of 89 teams and examine whether team diversity and network characteristics affect productivity. The study examines how the diversity of science teams along several variables affects overall team productivity. Results indicate several diversity measures associated with network position and team productivity. Teams with mixed institutional associations were more central to the overall network compared with teams that primarily comprised NHMFLs own scientists. Team cohesion was positively related to productivity. The study indicates that high productivity in teams is associated with high disciplinary diversity and low seniority diversity of team membership. Finally, an increase in the share of senior members negatively affects productivity, and teams with members in central structural positions perform better than other teams.
The Library Quarterly | 2005
Michelle M. Kazmer
Online learners often stay located in, and tied to, their communities, kinship networks, households, and workplaces. Institutions providing online education can thus create ties to communities as students draw their learning into networks in which they are already embedded. Frequent interactions across multiple media that are afforded by information and communication technologies (ICT) allow students to create strong ties with their fellow students and instructors. Those relationships provide a network of weak ties that is indirectly available to friends, coworkers, and community members who live and work near the students. Community‐embedded learning that takes advantage of these strong and weak ties and is appropriate to ICT modes of delivery is important for two reasons. The various clienteles served by students while they earn their degrees will affect library and information science (LIS) education and outcomes, and LIS distance education offered via interactive ICT can directly affect the clienteles served.
New Media & Society | 2007
Michelle M. Kazmer
People who work, learn, or play in online social worlds must sometimes leave those social worlds. Such departures may happen for many reasons. Often they are anticipated departures because the social world was meant from the start to be temporary. Most people do not yet have much practice at leaving an online social world, nor do we have a good model of the process. Activities that people undertake while disengaging from transient online social worlds affect them personally, as well as their future personal and professional relationships with one another. For this research, 30 students near the time of graduating from an online learning master’s degree program participated in semi-structured interviews exploring their activities and emotions related to disengaging. The result is a model of the disengaging process encompassing 12 dimensions.
The Library Quarterly | 2007
Michelle M. Kazmer
As more librarians earn master’s degrees online, it is important to understand how their educational experiences affect their professional practice. A crucial aspect of online learning is the residency: the time distance learners spend on campus, bonding together and with their educational institutions. Residencies are not practical or preferable for everyone. Some library practitioners would find it difficult to serve their constituents consistently if they left their posts for even brief residencies. Comparing student experiences in two online LIS programs, one with and one without a residency requirement, provides insights into the differences between them. Students in the program without a residency had less sense of community, found group work less successful, and built fewer friendships among their student colleagues; they built professional and support networks among local professional colleagues. Programs without a residency offer benefits for students and communities, for example, by providing the only means of professional education for paraprofessionals in underserved communities.
ACM Siggroup Bulletin | 2005
Michelle M. Kazmer; Caroline Haythornthwaite
This paper advocates an approach to the design, use and impact of new learning technologies that incorporates the view from multiple perspectives. This includes considering the questions and goals of students, faculty, administrators and co-workers, as well as social dimensions of learning, professional socialization, family dynamics, career, community formation, and institutional change.
The Electronic Library | 2002
Michelle M. Kazmer
Distance education students have unique needs from library services. This paper reports on a study of 17 distance learning students and describes what they say they need and want from the library. In talking to these distance students over time, we learned what general kinds of factors help them in their learning experience. Some of these are specifically related to library services, while some are more general but can be applied to the library. They range from changes in the provision of library materials and interpersonal services to large‐scale integration of the library with distance learning infrastructure and the governing institution as a whole.
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology | 2015
Besiki Stvilia; Charles C. Hinnant; Shuheng Wu; Adam Worrall; Dong Joon Lee; Kathleen Burnett; Gary Burnett; Michelle M. Kazmer; Paul F. Marty
To be effective and at the same time sustainable, a community data curation model needs to be aligned with the communitys current data practices, including research project activities, data types, and perceptions of data quality. Based on a survey of members of the condensed matter physics (CMP) community gathered around the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, a large national laboratory, this article defines a model of CMP research project tasks consisting of 10 task constructs. In addition, the study develops a model of data quality perceptions by CMP scientists consisting of four data quality constructs. The paper also discusses relationships among the data quality perceptions, project roles, and demographic characteristics of CMP scientists. The findings of the study can inform the design of a CMP data curation model that is aligned and harmonized with the communitys research work structure and data practices.
Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology | 2014
Michelle M. Kazmer; Mia Liza A. Lustria; Juliann Cortese; Gary Burnett; Ji-Hyun Kim; Jinxuan Ma; Jeana Frost
Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is a progressively debilitating neurodegenerative condition that occurs in adulthood and targets the motor neurons. Social support is crucial to the well‐being and quality of life of people with unpredictable and incurable diseases such as ALS. Members of the PatientsLikeMe (PLM) ALS online support community share social support but also exchange and build distributed knowledge within their discussion forum. This qualitative analysis of 1,000 posts from the PLM ALS online discussion examines the social support within the PLM ALS online community and explores ways community members share and build knowledge. The analysis responds to 3 research questions: RQ1: How and why is knowledge shared among the distributed participants in the PLM‐ALS threaded discussion forum?; RQ2: How do the participants in the PLM‐ALS threaded discussion forum work together to discover knowledge about treatments and to keep knowledge discovered over time?; and RQ3: How do participants in the PLM‐ALS forum co‐create and treat authoritative knowledge from multiple sources including the medical literature, healthcare professionals, lived experiences of patients and “other” sources of information such as lay literature and alternative health providers? The findings have implications for supporting knowledge sharing and discovery in addition to social support for patients.
web based communities | 2012
Michelle M. Kazmer
The disengaging process is an important aspect of the lifecycle of distributed collaborative pursuits such as virtual groups, online social networking, and e-learning. To explore the disengaging process in online learning, this research analysed 667 discussion board posts made by a close community of e-learners during the final 1.5 years of their time together in a graduate degree programme. Using a model of disengaging to frame a qualitative analysis of the posts reveals findings about the ways the students change their roles as they near the time of graduation, and demonstrates the complex inter-relationship of elements of the disengaging model that emerges as the students shift their focus away from the online learning community.