DOCSLIB.ORG

Characterizing the Youtube Video-Sharing Community∗

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Characterizing the Youtube Video-Sharing Community∗ Characterizing the YouTube video-sharing community∗ Rodrygo L. T. Santos, Bruno P. S. Rocha, Cristiano G. Rezende, Antonio A. F. Loureiro Department of Computer Science Federal University of Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte, MG 31270-901 Brazil {rodrygo,bpontes,rezende,loureiro}@dcc.ufmg.br ABSTRACT February 2005, YouTube was officially launched in Decem- The YouTube video-sharing community is a recent and suc- ber of the same year and has not stopped growing since then. cessful phenomenon that provides an expressive representa- By July 2006, the site reported to serve 100 million videos tion of a social network. Despite its accelerated growth, a per day, with a daily upload of more than 65,000 videos and deep study of YouTube’s topology has not yet been made nearly 20 million unique visitors per month – a 29% share available. For this work, we have collected a representative of the US multimedia entertainment market and 60% of all sample of YouTube using our Crawlanga tool and analyzed videos watched online [12]. Its storage demands were es- both its structural properties, as well as its social relation- timated at around 45 terabytes with several million dollar ships among users, among videos, and between users and expenses on bandwidth per month [3]. Within one year of videos. We analyze properties such as profile of users and its launch, YouTube was purchased by Google for US$1.65 popularity of videos in order to highlight the impact of social billion in stock. relationships on a content-sharing network. YouTube’s success can be seen as an example of the “wisdom of crowds” [14]: the site exerts no control over its users’ free- Categories and Subject Descriptors 2 H.2.8 [Database Management]: Database Applications- dom for publishing , in such a way that users not only share Data Mining; J.4 [Computer Applications]: Social and their videos with a few friends, but instead participate in a behavioral sciences huge decentralized community by creating and consuming terabytes of video content, ranging from home-made stand- General Terms up performances to eyewitness footages from inside news as they occur anywhere in the world. Human factors, Measurement Despite its enormous popularity and the sums of money in- Keywords volved, it is rather surprising that (at least to our knowl- Virtual communities, network sampling, network analysis edge) no study has been carried on unveiling the virtual community behind YouTube. 1. INTRODUCTION The last decade has witnessed the emergence of several pop- In this paper, we present an analysis of YouTube network, ularity phenomena through the word-of-mouth and self-pub- based on a sample of it we were able to collect using a lishing made feasible by the World Wide Web. This is true crawler tool. In our analysis we focus users and videos, for people, the content they produce, and the vehicles that and attributes and relationships between them. We observe distribute their production. Some of these phenomena have attributes such as number of videos visualizations, users sub- declined or have been replaced as rapid as they rose, while scription, users favorite lists, commenting, and others. We others have retained a steady pace of growth. also model the collected network as different networks in- cluding specific views as, for instance, a friendship network 1 The TIME’s Invention of the Year for 2006 [4], the YouTube between users and a network between videos connected by video-sharing website is one of the most recent and aston- edges that represent being part of a same user’s favorite list. ishing such examples of a Web phenomenon. Founded in This paper is organized as follows. On Section 2 we present ∗Data set will be made available in the camera ready version 1 work on similar networks and virtual communities. We http://www.youtube.com present some background on the YouTube video-sharing com- munity in Section 3. Sections 4 and 5 detail the crawling process and tool, as well as the data sample we used, re- spectively. Our analysis of attributes and relationships is discussed in Section 6. Finally, we present our conclusions in Section 7. 2According to the site policy, copyrighted or inappropriate content is reviewed after being flagged by the community. 2. RELATED WORK compares structural properties of the co-authorship networks The analysis of structural properties of large networks have in publication databases from different areas, including biomed- received much attention in the late years. Typically, stud- ical research, physics, and computer science. He presents re- ies include network properties such as degree distribution, sults on the mean and distribution of co-authorship degrees diameter, clustering coefficient, betweenness centrality, net- and clustering coefficients for these networks and shows the work resilience, mixing patterns, degree correlations, com- presence of the small world effect in all of them. Kumar munity structure, network navigation, etc. In this section, et al. [5] characterize the profile of more than one million we briefly outline some publications on the analysis of large- LiveJournal users with regards to three main dimensions: scale virtual communities, organized as social networks and age, geography, and interests. They show how over 70% information networks [11]. of friendship links among these users can be explained by combining these three dimensions. They also investigate the Anh et al. [1] compare structural properties of sampled friend- cultural aspect of highly-dynamic local, informal community ship networks from two social networking services (SNSs), formation in the blogospace, through the establishment of namely MySpace 3 and Orkut 4, and the entire topology of short-lived reading, posting, and listing relationships among the Cyworld 5 SNS. They uncover a two-period scaling be- small groups of users. havior in Cyworld’s degree distribution, being the exponent of each period correspondent to the exponent of the degree 3. THE YOUTUBEVIDEO-SHARINGCOM- distribution of MySpace and orkut, respectively. Also, they show how Cyworld’s testimonial network (a subset of its MUNITY The YouTube video-sharing community can be seen as an friendship network) presents a similar degree correlation to 10 real-life social networks. Friendship network properties are heterogeneous graph with basically two types of node: also studied by Kumar et al. [6]. They present measure- user and video. ments on two Yahoo! SNSs: Flickr 6, a one-million-node photo-sharing community, and Yahoo! 360 7, a five-million- Users can upload, view, and share video clips. Videos can node social networking website. They present a model of be rated, and the average rating and the number of times network growth by classifying users in these networks as a video has been watched are both published. Unregistered either (1) passive, loner members; (2) inviters, who bring users can watch most videos on the site; registered users offline friends to form isolated communities; and (3) linkers, have the ability to upload an unlimited number of videos. who play the role of bridging a large fraction of the entire Related videos, determined by the title and tags, appear to networking the network evolution. the right of the video. In the site’s second year new functions were added, providing the ability to post video ‘responses’ Liben-Nowell et al. [8] study the formation of friendship links and subscribe to content feeds for a particular user or users. in the LiveJournal 8 blogging community. They show that, YouTube had (and still has) a lot of traffic coming to the among the nearly 500,000 LiveJournal users with mappable site to view videos, but far fewer users actually creating and geographic locations (at the level of towns and cities), the posting content [15]. probability of two people being friends is inversely propor- tional to the number of people geographically close to them. Among all the potential relationships present in the YouTube Also, they find that this property influences the formation community, we consider the following in this paper: of two thirds of the friendship links among these users and prove analytically that short paths can be discovered in ev- ery network in which it is present. Link formation is also • user-user friendship: two users mutually regard each investigated by Backstrom et al. [2]. They study the influ- other as a friend; ence of network structural properties on the establishment of community membership links in two large sources of data: • user-user subscription: a user subscribes to video feeds the LiveJournal social networking and blogging service, with from another user; several million members and explicitly defined membership 9 • user-video favoring: a user adds a video to his/her list links, and DBLP , a publication database with several hun- of favorites; dred thousand authors with conferences regarded as proxies for communities. They show that the tendency of individu- • video-video relatedness: a video is regarded related to als to join a community is influenced by both the number of another one by the YouTube’s search engine. friends they have within the community and how connected these friends are to one another. 4. CRAWLING YOUTUBE Some works on information networks analysis have also em- Due to the amount of data required to analyze YouTube, ployed data sets from virtual communities. Newman [10] using a tool like a web crawler to collect data is a necessity. A web crawler needs to visit web pages of videos and user 3 profiles. It must be able to follow links representing rela- http://www.myspace.com tionships, like user friendship or commenting, and store the 4http://www.orkut.com information on visited nodes and followed edges in a format 5http://www.cyworld.com which can be further analyzed. As there is necessity for a 6http://www.flickr.com 7 large amount of data, the tool must be efficient and scalable.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • I Facebook and Panopticism: Healthy Curiosity Or Stalking?
    Facebook and Panopticism: Healthy Curiosity or Stalking? A thesis presented to the faculty of the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Mary Catherine Kennedy November 2009 © 2009. Mary Catherine Kennedy. All Rights Reserved. i This thesis titled Facebook and Panopticism: Healthy Curiosity or Stalking? by MARY CATHERINE KENNEDY has been approved for the School of Media Arts and Studies and the Scripps College of Communication by Karen E. Riggs Professor of Media Arts and Studies Gregory J. Shepherd Dean, Scripps College of Communication ii ABSTRACT KENNEDY, MARY C., M.A., November 2009, Telecommunications Facebook and Panopticism: Healthy Curiosity or Stalking? (108 pp.) Director of Thesis: Karen E. Riggs This study deepens existing knowledge concerning social networking sites, with specific interest in the social networking site Facebook and the phenomenon, “Facebook stalking”. By providing insights into lesser-known studies concerning user curiosity and surveillance online, the present research reveals that the terms ‘monitoring’ and ‘keeping up with’ or ‘keeping in touch with’ are most commonly used when referring to social searches within social networks; only when asked to think about surveillance in terms of stalking did interview participants refer to it as such. The present study aims to discover Facebook users’ perception of their friends’ disclosure while delving into the idea of “Facebook stalking”, specifically with regard to how users define it. Facebook’s evolution and prominence in the public sphere is dependent upon user satisfaction with and general understanding of the functionality of social networking websites. A discussion of these issues is beneficial to understanding how Facebook is used as a modern-day panopticon.
    [Show full text]
  • Deconstructing Bentham's Panopticon
    tripleC 9(1): 62-76, 2011 ISSN 1726-670X http://www.triple-c.at Deconstructing Bentham’s Panopticon: The New Meta- phors of Surveillance in the Web 2.0 Environment Manuela Farinosi Department of Human Sciences - University of Udine, Italy [email protected] Abstract: This article reflects on the meaning of the words “control” and “privacy” in light of the intensive diffusion of user generated content on the web. It presents some results of an empirical research based on 145 essays written by Italian students. The data were analysed from a qualitative point of view to understand how young people frame the topic of control on the web 2.0. The attention is focused on the metaphors used to describe online platforms and on the social environments they mention when they speak about the impacts of online diffusion of personal content on offline life. The results show that the new control practices cannot be adequately described within the classical framework of vertical control. The traditional panoptic principle of observation has to a certain extent been transformed and the Panopticon itself is no more an effective metaphor to describe the control dynamics on the web 2.0. Keywords: Social Media, Metaphors, Surveillance, Control, Panopticon, Privacy, Social Network Sites, Web 2.0, User Generated Content Acknowledgement: This paper was presented in the conference track “Surveillance in society“ (convenors: Anders Al- brechtslund, Kees Boersma, Christian Fuchs, Peter Lauritsen), 2010 Conference of the European Association for the Stud- ies of Science and Technology (EASST), University of Trento, Italy. September 2-4, 2010. 1.
    [Show full text]
  • Applying Social Network Analysis to Examine Program Output and Impact
    APPLYING SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS TO EXAMINE PROGRAM OUTPUT AND IMPACT Ying Zhang, Ph.D. Borjan Zic, Ph.D. January 2021 Manhattan Strategy Group 4340 East-West Highway, Suite 1100 Bethesda, MD 20814 [email protected] TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 1 APPLICATION 1: Tracking Interactions in a Community of Practice .........................................2 APPLICATION 2: Understanding Interdisciplinary Collaboration ...........................................4 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................6 References ................................................................................................................................ 7 Manhattan Strategy Group | i INTRODUCTION he COVID-19 pandemic has changed social In this paper, Manhattan Strategy Group (MSG) lives across the United States. Not only have presents two applications of SNA to illustrate how T the individuals we interact with changed, but social network data can help us understand the impact so has the manner and frequency of our interactions of federal programs. The first study focused on an with others. The changing social dynamics remind education program intended to enhance services that us how our lives are dependent on the people and promote adult literacy. The second project focused communities around us as well as the relevance of
    [Show full text]
  • Soc C167 – Virtual Communities and Social Media
    Soc C167 – Virtual Communities and Social Media University of California, Berkeley Tuesdays and Thursdays, 8:00am-9:30am 245 Li Ka Shing Instructor: Edwin Lin, Fall 2018 Instructor: Edwin Lin Email: [email protected] Office Hours: 487 Barrows Hall, Tuesdays 10am-1pm or by appointment Sign-up for regular OH at http://www.wejoinin.com/sheets/icwie Reader’s information will be posted on bCourses. Overview of Course Content: With the explosion of virtual communities and social media, technology and its effect on society has become a daily reality, invading all areas and aspects of our social lives. This ranges from pop culture, sports, and entertainment to political participation, sexual intimacy, and family. Everyone taking this course has some exposure to virtual communities and social media—even if one is unaware of the extent and depth of this exposure in their lives. As a result, this course is not about discovering new ideas and never-before-seen concepts, but rather providing some tools and perspectives to understand aspects of society that we are somewhat familiar with. Put another way, this course seeks to understand a growing aspect of our society through a different lens of understanding. Explicitly, the goals of this course are: 1) to provide a survey of subfields in social media research, 2) to expose you to what social science research looks like in these subfields, and 3) to provide a space for you to reflect and personally interact with what virtual communities and social media means in your own life. Email Policy: I am usually very good about answering emails, but please leave at least 2 days for me to get to you, especially over the weekend (I may not get to you until Monday/Tuesday).
    [Show full text]
  • Virtual Vs Traditional Communities: the Benefits of Facebook's Virtual
    Virtual Vs Traditional Communities: The Benefits of Facebook’s Virtual Communities… 1 Virtual Vs Traditional Communities: The Benefits of Facebook’s Virtual Communities and How they Differ from Smaller Traditional Communities. Crystal Beaini Curtin University OUA. NET204: Social Media, Communities and Networks Professor Mike Kent & Dr Jane Armstrong 2 Abstract This paper argues that social media platforms, specifically Facebook, are ideal spaces for the formation and success of diverse virtual communities. Furthermore, this paper challenges the view that virtual communities detract from their traditional counterparts. This paper examines Facebook’s ubiquity as a factor in the diversity of virtual communities and the content they share as well as the benefits associated with this. This paper also examines the benefits of social media communities in terms of their ability to offer help and support for people who do not have adequate support systems in place in their physical communities. Finally, this paper also examines the benefits of Facebook and virtual community participation for online activism. Relying on examples of actual Facebook communities around the platform and a range of literature on the topic of social media and communities, this paper argues that virtual and traditional communities are capable of operating parallel to and complimenting one another without significantly detracting from either. This paper also identifies room for further research. Keywords: Social Media, Communities, Facebook, Virtual Communities, Traditional Communities. Virtual Vs Traditional Communities: The Benefits of Facebook’s Virtual Communities and How they Differ from Smaller Traditional Communities. With the introduction of Web2.0 technologies and the rise of social media platforms such as Facebook, virtual communities have become an increasingly popular tool for connecting with others.
    [Show full text]
  • A Study of Internet Based Community Interactions
    Virtual Online Communities: A Study of Internet Based Community Interactions A dissertation presented to the faculty of the Scripps College of Communication of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Adrian M. Budiman August 2008 This dissertation titled Virtual Communities Online: A Study of Internet Based Community Interactions by ADRIAN M. BUDIMAN has been approved for the School of Media Arts and Studies and the Scripps College of Communication by Drew McDaniel Professor of Telecommunications Gregory J. Shepherd Dean, Scripps College of Communication ii Abstract BUDIMAN, ADRIAN M., Ph.D., August 2008, Mass Communication Virtual Online Communities: A Study of Internet Based Community Interactions (167 pp.) Director of Dissertation: Drew McDaniel The aim of this research was to better understand virtual online communities (VOCs), that is, communities that are formed and maintained through the Internet. This research was guided by four research questions: What do participants in VOCs actually seek? How does a participant critically evaluate information produced in VOCs? What differences do VOC members perceive between their online community experiences compared to their experiences in real-life face-to-face communities? In what ways might a VOC shape its members’ views toward political and social change? The methodology employed was participant observation of 20 informants within their online and offline realms plus in-depth interviews with each informant. Interviews and observations were conducted from 2005 – 2007. This research identified two different types of VOCs: dependent and self- contained VOCs. Dependent VOCs act as extensions to already existent face-to-face communities while self-sustained VOCs are communities where relationships between members are formed, developed, and nurtured purely through virtual encounters on the Internet based on shared interests.
    [Show full text]
  • Southern Communication Journal A
    This article was downloaded by: [American University Cairo] On: 1 March 2011 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 794677772] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37- 41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Southern Communication Journal Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t725304175 A virtual death and a real dilemma: Identity, trust, and community in cyberspace John W. Jordana a Department of Communication, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Milwaukee, WI To cite this Article Jordan, John W.(2005) 'A virtual death and a real dilemma: Identity, trust, and community in cyberspace', Southern Communication Journal, 70: 3, 200 — 218 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/10417940509373327 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10417940509373327 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, re-distribution, re-selling, loan or sub-licensing, systematic supply or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
    [Show full text]
  • 'Social-Network' Infrastructure to Improve Peer-To-Peer Overlay
    Leveraging ‘Social-Network’ Infrastructure to Improve Peer-to-Peer Overlay Performance: Results from Orkut Zahid Anwar†‡ William Yurcik‡ Vivek Pandey† Asim Shankar† Indranil Gupta† Roy H. Campbell† † Department of Computer Science ‡ National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign USA {anwar,byurcik}@ncsa.uiuc.edu {pandey1,shankar}@uiuc.edu {indy,rhc}@cs.uiuc.edu Abstract directly. This adds value to the edges of a network where the information is being collected and used. Application-level peer-to-peer (P2P) network Gnutella – a popular file sharing application, overlays are an emerging paradigm that facilitates broadcasts messages to all the peers in the path of the decentralization and flexibility in the scalable query. A querying peer sends the query to all of its deployment of applications such as group peers, who in turn send the query to all of their peers communication, content delivery, and data sharing. until the query reaches a peer that produces a hit However the construction of the overlay graph topology matching the query. This peer sends back a reply optimized for low latency, low link and node stress and containing its address, the size of the file, speed of lookup performance is still an open problem. We present transfer, etc. The reply traverses the same path but in a design of an overlay constructed on top of a social reverse order back to the querying peer. This passing of network and show that it gives a sizable improvement in messages generates much traffic in the network, often lookups, average round-trip delay and scalability as leading to congestion and slow responses.
    [Show full text]
  • Virtual Imagery Among Dutch Orthodox Protestant Homosexuals
    Contesting Community Online: Virtual Imagery among Dutch Orthodox Protestant Homosexuals Willem de Koster Erasmus University, Rotterdam Whereas substantial scholarly attention has been paid to the online presentation of self, symbolic interactionist approaches are largely ab- sent in the literature on virtual communities. Instead, recurrent ques- tions are whether communities can exist online and whether specific online venues qualify as communities. This article aims to move beyond these dichotomous questions by studying how different meanings at- tached to an online venue can be understood from offline experiences. In a case study of a Dutch forum for orthodox Protestant homosexu- als, two types of understanding of online community emerged from an analysis of fifteen in-depth interviews. Users struggling with stigmati- zation in offline life seek empathic support and have an encompassing sense of online community—the forum as “refuge.” For users dealing with practical everyday questions, online contacts are part of so-called personal communities and help ameliorate offline life—the forum as “springboard.” Apart from demonstrating that online forums can serve as Goffmanian backstages in two distinct ways, these results indicate it is fruitful to take a symbolic interactionist approach to uncover rela- tionships between offline and online social life. Keywords: backstage, Goffman, offline-online relationship, sexual minorities, stigma, virtual community, virtual imagery Already in the early days of the field of research that might be termed “internet studies,” the value of Goffman’s notions on the presentation of self was recognized (Miller 1995). Since then, scholars have documented how individuals use com- puter-mediated communication to present “serious” or “playful” self-identities (Waskul and Douglass 1997; see also Hardey 2002 and Wynn and Katz 1997).
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Knee Arthroplasty: Shared Experience in a Virtual
    KNEE ARTHROPLASTY: SHARED EXPERIENCE IN A VIRTUAL COMMUNITY By MICHAEL D. BROOKSHIRE A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2011 1 © 2011 Michael D. Brookshire 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I would like to thank Burlingame Industries of Rialto, California for its financial support during the time it took to complete this doctoral degree. I will forever be grateful to Robert C. Burlingame, not only for his encouragement, but also for allowing me to work an abbreviated schedule throughout coursework and the writing of this dissertation, creating a working environment that helped alleviate many of the day-to- day pressures graduate students experience in pursuit of a doctorate. I would like to thank my committee, Chair Dr. David H. Ostroff, members Dr. Cory Armstrong and Dr. Amy Jo Coffey, and outside member Dr. Kenneth Sassaman. My committee made this a rigorous process, and I am the better for that. And a special nod to Dr. Sassaman for offering advice and support beyond this dissertation during a particularly difficult time in the process. A heartfelt thanks also goes out to Associate Dean Dr. Debbie Treise, who provided unwavering support; academic when needed, emotional when the demons of doubt slipped their leash, threatening to render impotent the entire endeavor. Thank yous are in order for Craig Lee, without whom the survey component of this paper would never have seen the light of day; Christina Locke, whose formatting skills helped shaped the final product; Paul Kirk, whose help in locating sources proved invaluable to this research, while his humorously intelligent jabs at my theoretical musings slapped me back into reality when I took the process too seriously; Kim Holloway, whose help with, and advice on, all things financial in my time at Florida were immeasurable; and Jody Hedge, to whom I will be eternally grateful for guiding me through matriculation and registration … every … single … semester.
    [Show full text]
  • Blogs As Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project
    Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community in the Julie/Julia Project Anita Blanchard, University of North Carolina at Charlotte Blogs as Virtual Communities: Identifying a Sense of Community Researchers, practitioners, and the media have used the term virtual community to refer to vastly different computer-mediated communication (CMC) groups. EBay, a soap opera newsgroup, The WELL, a website for wristwatch enthusiasts, and more have all been referred to as virtual communities (Baym, 1995; Boyd, 2002; Rheingold, 1993; Rothaermel & Sugiyama, 2001). Should blogs be considered virtual communities, too? To answer this question, we must understand, first, why virtual communities are considered important, and, second, what the characteristics of a virtual community are. Then, we must determine if at least some blogs have these characteristics. Why are Virtual Communities Important? The term "virtual community" is used quite frequently. Some definitions of virtual community have become so broad that they essentially refer to any CMC group (Bieber, Engelbart, Furuta, & Hiltz, 2002; Evans, Wedande, Ralston, & van 't Hul, 2001; Falk, 1999; Kardaras, Karakostas, & Papathanassiou, 2003). Some community analysts might argue that calling any online group a virtual community represents yet another example of the overuse of the term "community" to the point that concept has lost any real meaning (Harris, 1999). But why does this overuse exist? What is so important about being a virtual "community" that all these CMC groups claim to be one? The answer to this question is twofold. First, virtual communities are considered important for social reasons. As CMC groups initially became popular, community activists argued that they would help replace the relationships lost as people became more isolated from their neighbors (Rheingold, 1993; Schuler, 1996).
    [Show full text]
  • SHORT CIRCUIT: How an Orkut-Based Environment Is Improving the Communication Between the Different Levels of a Higher Education Institution
    1 SHORT CIRCUIT: How an orkut-based environment is improving the communication between the different levels of a Higher Education Institution João Augusto Mattar Neto Universidade Anhembi Morumbi – [email protected] Carmem Silva Rodrigues Maia Universidade Anhembi Morumbi – [email protected] Institutional Quality Issues related to aspects of Distance, Flexible and ICT- based Education II - Post-Secondary or University Education Abstract: The paper discusses the threats and opportunities of a platform developed at Anhembi Morumbi University (Sao Paulo, Brazil), named Tubarão (Shark), which generates open communication among students, professors, university staff and the high administration. It was planned as an orkut-like environment, with the intent that the students would quickly and easily accept and adopt it as an online tool. The paper investigates the vision of the system, the history of its implementation, and the current testing phase, previewing its potential problems as well as its breakthrough applications, including distance learning. It also presents a monitoring research of the platform during two months, analyzing data as the growth of the number of communities, number of users, number of files deposited at the system, and the number of posts, as well as the major subjects of interest, selecting specific threads of interesting conversations established by the different levels of members at the institution. Keywords: distance learning; distance education; communication; higher education; university; informal learning. 2 The purpose of this article is to discuss, for the first time, the development and implementation of a platform named Tubarão (Shark) at Anhembi Morumbi University (São Paulo, Brazil). It also helps to fill a gap on literature of collaborative work and online communities, one of the largest challenges in the field of online education (CARABAJAL et al).
    [Show full text]