Fresh from the IEEE International Symposium on Technology and Society (ISTAS 08), slides from my talk on “How Web 2.0 Communities Solve the Knowledge Sharing Problem.” (Thanks to Andrew Clement for checking during the talk and seeing the slides weren’t there as promised! Caught again.)
The main addition to the original paper are thoughts about where we might apply knowledge sharing techniques from Web 2.0 communities. First, by bringing these knowledge sharing tools and practices into businesses as they are organized today (Enterprise 2.0). Second, and more profoundly, by helping to create a ‘business commons’ that shares practices and knowledge normally kept (and constantly reinvented) within specific organizations.
The only other addition is data on how the web itself has changed. Web pages are no longer just hypertext, but serve more as an interface to other resources (on average, there are 50 links to outside objects per page) and an environment for running programs (on average, 7 scripts per page, plus code on the server side). Web 2.0 is not just a business concept—it is also grounded in changes to the web itself.
While prepping for the Virtual Worlds panel at American Bar Association National Institute on Cyberlaw, I kept running into papers from a great journal called CyberPsychology & Behavior.
Here’s a taste of their research results since 2007:
College students
- More internet use by college students leads to more school life satisfaction.
- Time spent playing video games has a negative correlation with college GPA.
- More time IMing at college is associated with greater difficulty in concentrating on academic tasks. More time reading books leads to less ‘academic distractability’.
- College students with a ‘high sexual disposition’ (erotophilic) on the Sexual Opinion Survey are more likely to click on a link to unsolicited internet pornography. Antisocial students are even more likely to click.
Gaming/MMOs
- MMO players spend an average of 22 hours per week online.
- A great college student experiment: students are randomly assigned to play arcade games, console games, solo fantasy/adventure games, or MMOs for a month (minimum one hour per week). MMO players reported significantly more hours played, worse overall health, worse sleep quality, but also greater enjoyment in the game, greater desire to continue playing, and more online friendships. MMO players reported more interference with real-world socializing and schoolwork.
- About 75% of MMO players have made ‘a good friend’ online. 55% of female players have met an online friend in real life, 37% of males. 43% of females have been ‘attracted to’ another player. 15% of females date other players. 39% said they would discuss sensitive issues with online friends that they wouldn’t discuss with their real life friends.
- 21% of MMO players prefer socializing online to offline. 57% of gamers had engaged in gender swapping.
- Warcraft players rate their characters more favorably than they rate themselves.
- 18% of online poker players are problem gamblers (according to DSM-IV criteria). Problem gambling is best predicted by negative mood states after playing, and by gender swapping during play.
- Super Monkey Ball 2 players experience brain wave (EEG) changes when they pick up bananas (consistent with increased cortical activation and arousal), fall off the edge of the game board (consistent with motor functions), and reach a game goal (consistent with relaxation).
- For Taiwanese students, online game players are more extroverted and more open (creative, curious, open-minded) than non-players.
- Teams that wear red in first person shooter games are significantly more likely to win than teams that wear blue. Players also perform better in warm (reddish) lighting than cool (bluish) lighting.
- People with a more physically aggressive personality play violence-oriented video games in a more aggressive way.
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I’m tired of out of date, expensive textbooks.
I’m tired of fighting copyright fair use battles.
I’m tired of students being trapped in my class, when other students and teachers around the world are grappling with exactly the same issues.
I want easier ways to share the useful parts of my classes with the world.
So I’ve signed the Cape Town Declaration on Open Education. By signing it, I’ve promised to use and improve openly available education resources. I have to release my own teaching materials openly. And I have to encourage USF to adopt policies encouraging open education.
I believe that university teaching is ripe for change. There haven’t yet been any great successes (that I know of) among the projects to create wikipedia-like textbook replacements. It will take a robust online community to make it happen. But once a successful model appears that shows the benefits of a common, open education resource for academic area X, other areas will quickly follow.
I look forward to the day where everything in my class - readings, students assignments, discussions, and projects - is a URL pointing to an open resource.
More on the Open Education movement:
SF Chronicle Editorial - Bringing open resources to textbooks and teaching.
OpEd on Open Content from the ISKME foundation.
Open Education Resources: OERCommons.
Connexions Repository (Business).
J.P. Allen is an Associate Professor of Information Technology at the School of Business and Management, University of San Francisco. 