Yoram M. Kalman

Wikibooks in higher education

In this case study, wiki technology was applied to the development of an introductory academic textbook on information systems. While the development, production and distribution of traditional textbooks are influenced by commercial interests, the wikitextbook was developed collaboratively by faculty and by students, and was made available online free of charge. After about two years of activity, the wikitextbook accumulated 564 sub-chapters, co-authored by undergraduate and graduate students in more than 20 classes offered by seven academic departments across three Israeli universities. We discuss the potential of wikitextbooks as vehicles of empowerment to students, teachers, and the discipline. This type of collaborative online technology intimates an influence on the status-quo in academic education in favor of less empowered stakeholders. However, caution is advised in drawing premature conclusions from results reported here. The implementation of wikitextbook should be augmented by a careful study of cultural, societal, behavioral and pedagogic variables.

Online Pauses and Silence: Chronemic Expectancy Violations in Written Computer-Mediated Communication:

This study examines e-mail response latency as an expectancy violation and explores its impact. Managers evaluate job candidates who varied in their response latency to an e-mail (1 day, 2 weeks, and silence for more than a month) and in their reward valence. As predicted by expectancy violations theory, candidate reward valence moderates the effect of response latency on variables such as applicant evaluation, credibility, and attractiveness. A norms-based definition of online silence is presented, and the influential and complex role of response latency and of online silence as nonverbal chronemic cues in written CMC is elaborated.

Email Chronemics: Unobtrusive Profiling of Response Times

One of the unknowns of emailing is the time it will take the receiver to form and post a reply. Response times vary considerably, and the chronemics of email are an important non-verbal cue which can convey meaning as well as influence interactional coherence. While privacy and technical challenges have so far limited quantitative assessment of responsiveness chronemics, an opportunity became available with the recent release into the public domain of an unprecedentedly large corporate collection of private email messages. An analysis of over 16,000 responses extracted from a large database of email messages created by Enron employees was performed. Responsiveness profiles of individual users and of all users are described, and their aggregate temporal distribution is evaluated. The generalizability of these findings as well as their implication to current theory on email response times is discussed.

A race to the bottom: MOOCs and higher education business models

This is a critical examination of the claims that innovations such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) will disrupt the business models of the higher education sector. It describes what business models are, analyses the business model of free MOOCs offered by traditional universities and compares that model to that of paid online courses offered by distance teaching universities. The results of the analysis suggest that, in their present form, MOOCs are unlikely to address the challenge of reaching and assisting students from disadvantaged backgrounds and in developing countries. Nevertheless, MOOCs and the buzz surrounding them do signal a threat to the higher education sector, namely the widening gap between the skills of graduates of the educational system and the societal expectations from them.

Letter repetitions in computer-mediated communication: A unique link between spoken and online language

Abstract Computer-mediated communication (CMC) affords many CMC cues which augment the verbal content of the message: all uppercase letters, asterisks, emoticons, punctuation marks, chronemics (time-related messages) and letter repetitions, to name a few. Letter repetitions are unique CMC cues in that they appear to be a written emulation of a spoken paralinguistic cue – phoneme extension. In this study we explore letter repetitions as a CMC cue, with specific emphasis on elucidating the link between them and spoken nonverbal cues. The letter repetitions are studied in the Enron Corpus, a large ecologically valid collection (∼500,000) of e-mail messages sent by and to employees of the Enron Corporation. We conclude that letter repetitions in the corpus often, but not always, emulate spoken nonverbal cues. This conclusion is examined in a longitudinal analysis that demonstrates the dynamic nature of this cue, and suggests that the usage of letter repetitions is increasing over time, while the link to spoken language is diminishing.

Filing, piling, and everything in between: The dynamics of E-mail inbox management

Managing the constant flow of incoming messages is a daily challenge faced by knowledge workers who use technologies such as e‐mail and other digital communication tools. This study focuses on the most ubiquitous of these technologies, e‐mail, and unobtrusively explores the ongoing inbox‐management activities of thousands of users worldwide over a period of 8 months. The study describes the dynamics of these inboxes throughout the day and the week as users strive to handle incoming messages, read them, classify them, respond to them in a timely manner, and archive them for future reference, all while carrying out the daily tasks of knowledge workers. It then tests several hypotheses about the influence of specific inbox‐management behaviors in mitigating the causes of e‐mail overload, and proposes a continuous index that quantifies one of these inbox‐management behaviors. This inbox clearing index (ICI) expands on the widely cited trichotomous classification of users into frequent filers, spring cleaners, and no filers, as suggested by Whittaker and Sidner (1996). We propose that the ICI allows shifting the focus, from classifying users to characterizing a diversity of user behaviors and measuring the relationships between these behaviors and desired outcomes.

Detecting linguistic HCI markers in an online aphasia support group

Aphasia is an acquired language disorder resulting from trauma or injury to language areas of the brain. Despite extensive research on the impact of aphasia on traditional forms of communication, little is known about the impact of aphasia on computer-mediated communication (CMC). In this study we asked whether the well-documented language deficits associated with aphasia can be detected in online writing of people with aphasia. We analyzed 150 messages (14,754 words) posted to an online aphasia support forum, by six people with aphasia and by four controls. Significant linguistic differences between people with aphasia and controls were detected, suggesting five putative linguistic HCI markers for aphasia. These findings suggest that interdisciplinary research on communication disorders and CMC has both applied and theoretical implications.

A distributed model for managing academic staff in an international online academic programme

Online delivery of programmes of Higher Education typically involves a distributed community of students interacting with a single university site, at which the teachers, learning resources and administration of the programme are located. The alternative model, of a fully “Virtual University”, which assumes no physical campus, poses problems of resource provision, recognition, and accreditation. We describe here an intermediate solution, based on an established on-ground university, but in which both students and teachers are distributed worldwide. We discuss the issues of management, communication, and quality assurance that are faced in implementing this fully distributed model. We describe the solutions we have applied in a wholly online programme of Higher Education which is delivered to over 2,000 graduate students in more than 100 countries by a worldwide pool of instructors.

The Construction of Failure and Success Concepts in K-12 ICT Integration

The integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) into educational systems is one of the greatest challenges faced by educators and policymakers. Despite high-profile efforts and significant investments of resources, ICT integration programs in the K-12 system generate plenty of talk about failure. This study explores the construction of these failure and success con- cepts in the Israeli national ICT integration program. An application of actor-network theory (ANT) to the national program, as well as to a local ICT integration program, reveals significant similarities and differences in the networks of the two programs. We propose that five categories of these differences point to possible causes for the increased level of talk of failure in the na- tional program. The ANT findings suggest further analysis, utilizing the social construction of technology (SCOT) approach to study the interpretive flexibility of the relevant social groups in- volved in the ICT integration programs. The SCOT analysis suggests that the interpretive flexibil- ity of the different groups is a source of disagreements around the ICT integration programs.

Characterizing Quantitative Measures of User Engagement on Organizational Facebook Pages

Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook open up novel communication and marketing capabilities by engaging customers and other organizational stakeholders. This study applies insights from Social Information Processing theory to quantitatively characterize five measures of user engagement on SNSs: likes, comments and shares, and two chronemic (time-related) measures of response time and of the rate of comments. We use data collected unobtrusively from 939 posts on Facebook pages of seven organizations to describe the prevalence of the engagement activities, to measure the correlations between them, and to explore how engagement is influenced by post attributes. Findings demonstrate that, similarly to customer engagement behaviors in traditional settings, user engagement behaviors on SNSs too are rich and multifaceted, and are influenced by each organizations unique characteristics. The findings also suggest that engagement with a post can be predicted based on activity levels in the first hour after it is posted.