Sean P. Goggins

Completely online group formation and development: small groups as socio‐technical systems

Purpose – This paper has two purposes. First, to provide insight into the formation of completely online small groups, paying special attention to how their work practices develop, and how they form identity. Second, to pursue conceptual development of a more multi‐level view of completely online group experience, which can be made visible through analysis of the unique interaction logging system used in this study.Design/methodology/approach – The authors conduct a mixed methods study that integrates interviews, grounded theory analysis, case study methods and social network analysis to build a multi‐layered view of completely online group and community development.Findings – Completely online group formation is explicated as a socio‐technical system. The paper identifies themes of tool uptake and use, and patterns of interaction that accompany group formation and development of completely online group practices. These patterns show little respect for the boundaries of space and time. It then shows how g...

Performance and participation in open source software on GitHub

A few studies have attempted to provide metrics of success in open source software (OSS) projects but the role a code hosting workspace plays in how performance is viewed and measured is little examined. We conducted qualitative, exploratory research with lead and core developers on three successful projects on GitHub to understand how OSS communities on GitHub measure success. These results were obtained in connection with a larger project that is designed to understand the structure of code hosting platforms in relation to participation and performance. We report two main findings. First, lead and core members of the projects we interviewed display a nuanced understanding of community participation in their assessment of success. Second, they attribute increased participation on their projects to the features and usability provided by GitHub.

Group Informatics: A Methodological Approach and Ontology for Sociotechnical Group Research

We present a methodological approach, called Group Informatics, for understanding the social connections that are created between members of technologically mediated groups. Our methodological approach supports focused thinking about how online groups differ from each other, and diverge from their face-to-face counterparts. Group Informatics is grounded in 5 years of empirical studies of technologically mediated groups in online learning, software engineering, online political discourse, crisis informatics, and other domains. We describe the Group Informatics model and the related, 2-phase methodological approach in detail. Phase one of the methodological approach centers on a set of guiding research questions aimed at directing the application of Group Informatics to new corpora of integrated electronic trace data and qualitative research data. Phase 2 of the methodological approach is a systematic set of steps for transforming electronic trace data into weighted social networks.

Twitter zombie: architecture for capturing, socially transforming and analyzing the twittersphere

Social computational systems emerge in the wild on popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, but there remains confusion about the relationship between social interactions and the technical traces of interaction left behind through use. Twitter interactions and social experience are particularly challenging to make sense of because of the wide range of tools used to access Twitter (text message, website, iPhone, TweetDeck and others), and the emergent set of practices for annotating message context (hashtags, reply tos and direct messaging). Further, Twitter is used as a back channel of communication in a wide range of contexts, ranging from disaster relief to watching television. Our study examines Twitter as a transport protocol that is used differently in different socio-technical contexts, and presents an analysis of how researchers might begin to approach studies of Twitter interactions with a more reflexive stance toward the application programming interfaces (APIs) Twitter provides. We conduct a careful review of existing literature examining socio-technical phenomena on Twitter, revealing a collective inconsistency in the description of data gathering and analysis methods. In this paper, we present a candidate architecture and methodological approach for examining specific parts of the Twittersphere. Our contribution begins a discussion among social media researchers on the topic of how to systematically and consistently make sense of the social phenomena that emerge through Twitter. This work supports the comparative analysis of Twitter studies and the development of social media theories.

Network analysis of trace data for the support of group work: activity patterns in a completely online course

A 16-student, completely online software design course was studied using social network analysis and grounded theory techniques. Bi-directional (read and post) log data of user activity was recorded to understand how small group networks change over time with activity type (individual, peer-to-peer, and small group). Network structure was revealed through sociograms and triangulated with discussion board topics and interview data on group experience. Results show significant differences in network structure across activity types, which are supported by open coding and axial coding of the text of member discussions and editing patterns of member work products. It is also indicated that bi-directional log data, contextualized to specific activities and artifacts, revealed a more accurate and complete description of small group activity than ordinary, uni-directional log data would have. Our findings have implications for tool development revealing group structure and software design for completely online group work.

Learning analytics in CSCL with a focus on assessment: an exploratory study of activity theory-informed cluster analysis

In this paper we propose an automated strategy to assess participation in a multi-mode math discourse environment called Virtual Math Teams with Geogrebra (VMTwG). A holistic participation clustering algorithm is applied through the lens of activity theory. Our activity theory-informed algorithm is a step toward accelerating heuristic approaches to assessing collaborative work in synchronous technology mediated environments like VMTwG. Our Exploratory findings provide an example of a novel, time-efficient, valid, and reliable participatory learning assessment tool for teachers in computer mediated learning environments. Scaling online learning with a combination of computation and theory is the overall goal of the work this paper is situated within.

Connecting Theory to Social Technology Platforms: A Framework For Measuring Influence in Context

In this article, the authors synthesize 3 years of social technologies research, including studies of Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub, to present a theory driven framework to guide future social scientific research using “Big Data.” They connect levels of analysis derived from empirical study of influence to the electronic trace data generated by social technologies. Specifically, the authors outline a relationship between social media technology platforms, individual goals for participation, and emergent small groups to inform future research on influence in social technologies. They incorporate theory from small group literature, communities and networks of practice, and media theory to explicate a contextual framework for measuring influence. In their discussion, the authors build on the contrast between influence indicators in Facebook, Twitter, and GitHub to argue for a greater focus on the influence abstractions of articulation and affiliation.

Cooperation and groupness: community formation in small online collaborative groups

We present a detailed descriptive analysis of the adoption and adaptation of common online tools by a newly forming small group with a cooperative work task. We compare their use of different tools over the course of successive specific cooperative activities, and describe how they use these tools as objects in the formation of a small online community. General patterns of participation that recognize the physical contexts of online group members, and specific patterns of interaction that influence the formation of an online community are explicated. The results of this study have implications for understanding how tools and tasks influence group formation and sense of community in online systems.

Understanding the popular users

Context: the ability to follow other users and projects on GitHub has introduced a new layer of open source software development participants who observe but do not contribute to projects. It has not been fully explored how following others influences the actions of GitHub users. Objective: this paper studies the motivation behind following (or not following) others and the influence of popular users on their followers. Method: a mixed methods research approach was used including a survey of 800 GitHub users to uncover the reasons for following on GitHub and a complementary quantitative analysis of the activity of GitHub users to examine influence. Our quantitative analysis studied 199 popular (most followed) users and their followers. Results: we found that popular users do influence their followers by guiding them to new projects. As a users popularity increases, so does their rate of influence, yet the same is not true for a popular users rate of contribution. Conclusions: these results indicate that a new type of leadership is emerging through GitHubs following feature and popularity can be more important than contribution in influencing others. We discuss implications of popularity and influence and their impact on social structure and leadership on OSS projects.

Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning at the Workplace: CSCL@Work

This book is an edited volume of case studies exploring the uptake and use of computer supported collaborative learning in work settings. This book fills a significant gap in the literature. A number of existing works provide empirical research on collaborative work practices (Lave & Wenger, 1987; Davenport, 2005), the sharing of information at work (Brown & Duguid, 2000), and the development of communities of practice in workplace settings (Wenger, 1998). Others examine the munificent variation of information and communication technology use in the work place, including studies of informal social networks, formal information distribution and other socio-technical combinations found in work settings (Gibson & Cohen, 2003). Another significant thread of prior work is focused on computer supported collaborative learning, much of it investigating the application of computer support for learning in the context of traditional educational institutions, like public schools, private schools, colleges and tutoring organizations. Exciting new theories of how knowledge is constructed by groups (Stahl, 2006), how teachers contribute to collaborative learning (reference to another book in the series) and the application of socio-technical scripts for learning is explicated in book length works on CSCL. Book length empirical work on CSCW is widespread, and CSCL book length works are beginning to emerge with greater frequency. We distinguish CSCL at Work from prior books written under the aegis of training and development, or human resources more broadly. The book aims to fill a void between existing works in CSCW and CSCL, and will open with a chapter characterizing the emerging application of collaborative learning theories and practices to workplace learning. CSCL and CSCW research each make distinct and important contributions to the construction of collaborative workplace learning.