Ute Walker

Making User-Generated Content Communities Work in Higher Education – The Importance of Setting Incentives

The concept of User-Generated Content (UGC) offers impressive potential for innovative learning and teaching scenarios in higher education. Examples like Wikipedia and Facebook illustrate the enormous effects of multiple users world-wide contributing to a pool of shared resources, such as videos and pictures and also lexicographical descriptions. Apart from single examples, however, the systematic use of these virtual technologies in higher education still needs further exploration. Only few examples display the successful application of UGC Communities at university scenarios. We argue that a major reason for this can be seen in the fact that the organizational dimension of setting up UGC Communities has widely been neglected so far. In particular, we indicate the need for incentive setting to actively involve students and achieve specific pedagogical objectives. We base our study on organizational theories and derive strategies for incentive setting that have been applied in a practical e-Learning scenario involving students from Germany and New Zealand.

Discursive construction of social presence and identity positions in an international bilingual collaboration

Abstract This article examines the discursive construction of social presence and identity in a bilingual collaboration between tertiary distance learners of German in New Zealand and Academic English students in Germany. Drawing on positioning theory, this small-scale study investigated the collaborative practices of a group of students, whose synchronous online interactions were analyzed for manifestations of social presence and discursive strategies to project or resist identity positions through bilingual means. The findings showed the enactment of a ‘work & play’ identity, where formal monolingual discourse patterns alternated with playful and creative uses of humour and translanguaging strategies. The learners developed a rich interactional structure supported through multiple layers of cohesive ties which helped build a productive learning community embedded in social interaction and facilitated by social presence.