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22 results on '"Hjorth, Isis"'

1. Understanding Communication Patterns in MOOCs: Combining Data Mining and qualitative methods

Author

Eynon, Rebecca, Hjorth, Isis, Yasseri, Taha, and Gillani, Nabeel

Subjects
Computer Science - Computers and Society, Computer Science - Social and Information Networks, Physics - Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability, Physics - Physics and Society
Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer unprecedented opportunities to learn at scale. Within a few years, the phenomenon of crowd-based learning has gained enormous popularity with millions of learners across the globe participating in courses ranging from Popular Music to Astrophysics. They have captured the imaginations of many, attracting significant media attention - with The New York Times naming 2012 "The Year of the MOOC." For those engaged in learning analytics and educational data mining, MOOCs have provided an exciting opportunity to develop innovative methodologies that harness big data in education., Comment: Preprint of a chapter to appear in "Data Mining and Learning Analytics: Applications in Educational Research"

Published
2016
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5. Structural limitations of learning in a crowd: communication vulnerability and information diffusion in MOOCs

Author

Gillani, Nabeel, Yasseri, Taha, Eynon, Rebecca, and Hjorth, Isis

Subjects
Physics - Physics and Society, Computer Science - Computers and Society, Computer Science - Social and Information Networks, Physics - Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) bring together a global crowd of thousands of learners for several weeks or months. In theory, the openness and scale of MOOCs can promote iterative dialogue that facilitates group cognition and knowledge construction. Using data from two successive instances of a popular business strategy MOOC, we filter observed communication patterns to arrive at the "significant" interaction networks between learners and use complex network analysis to explore the vulnerability and information diffusion potential of the discussion forums. We find that different discussion topics and pedagogical practices promote varying levels of 1) "significant" peer-to-peer engagement, 2) participant inclusiveness in dialogue, and ultimately, 3) modularity, which impacts information diffusion to prevent a truly "global" exchange of knowledge and learning. These results indicate the structural limitations of large-scale crowd-based learning and highlight the different ways that learners in MOOCs leverage, and learn within, social contexts. We conclude by exploring how these insights may inspire new developments in online education., Comment: Pre-print version. Published version available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep06447

Published
2014
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6. Communication Communities in MOOCs

Author

Gillani, Nabeel, Eynon, Rebecca, Osborne, Michael, Hjorth, Isis, and Roberts, Stephen

Subjects
Computer Science - Computers and Society, Computer Science - Social and Information Networks, Statistics - Machine Learning
Abstract

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) bring together thousands of people from different geographies and demographic backgrounds -- but to date, little is known about how they learn or communicate. We introduce a new content-analysed MOOC dataset and use Bayesian Non-negative Matrix Factorization (BNMF) to extract communities of learners based on the nature of their online forum posts. We see that BNMF yields a superior probabilistic generative model for online discussions when compared to other models, and that the communities it learns are differentiated by their composite students' demographic and course performance indicators. These findings suggest that computationally efficient probabilistic generative modelling of MOOCs can reveal important insights for educational researchers and practitioners and help to develop more intelligent and responsive online learning environments., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table. Submitted for review to UAI 2014

Published
2014

8. Networked cultural production : filmmaking in the Wreckamovie community

Author

Hjorth, Isis Amelie, Meyer, Eric T., and Eynon, Rebecca

Subjects
791.43, Sociology, Internet research, Internet and everyday life, Sociology of cultural production, crowdsourcing, peer production, cultural capital, social capital, symbolic capital, Wreckamovie.com, ethnography, networked cultural production, Bourdieu, conversion of capital, digital labour, online communities, crowdfunding, cultural industries, Benkler, art worlds, embedded case study, Iron Sky, Star Wreck 2pi, collaborative online platform, Web 2.0, Cultural Sociology, participant observation
Abstract

This thesis challenges core assumptions associated with the peer production of culture using the web-based collaborative film production platform Wreckamovie to understand how peer production works in practice. Active cultural participation is a growing political priority for many governments and cultural bodies, but these priorities are often implemented without a basis in empirical evidence, making it necessary for rigorous scholarship to tackle emerging networked cultural production. Existing work portrays peer production efforts as unrealistically distinct from proprietary, market-based production, incorrectly suggesting that peer production allows distributed, non-monetarily motivated, collaboration between self-selected individuals in hierarchy-free communities. In overcoming these assumptions, this thesis contributes to the development of a consolidated theoretical framework encompassing the complicated and multifaceted nature of networked cultural production. This theoretical framing extends Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and reconciles it with Becker’s Art Worlds framework, and further embeds and draws on Benkler’s notion of commons-based peer production. Concretely, this research tackles the emergence of new collaborative production models enabled by networked technologies, and theorizes the tensions and challenges characterizing such production forms. Secondly, this thesis redefines cultural participation and considers the divisions of labour in online filmmaking materializing from the interactions between professional and non-professional filmmakers. Finally, this study considers the social economies surrounding networked cultural production, including crowdfunding, and characterizes associated conversions of capital, such as the conversion of symbolic capital into financial capital. Methodologically, this thesis employs an embedded case study strategy. It examines four feature film productions facilitated by the online platform Wreckamovie, as well as the online community within which these productions are embedded. The four production cases have completed all production stages, and have resulted in completed cultural goods during the course of data collection. This study’s findings were derived from two and half years of participant observations, interviews with 29 Wreckamovie community and production members, and the examination of archived production-related discourses (2006-2013). Ultimately, this study makes concrete proposals towards a theory of networked cultural production with clear policy implications.

Published
2014

9. Cross-Disciplinary Lessons for the Future Internet

Author

Oostveen, Anne-Marie, Hjorth, Isis, Pickering, Brian, Boniface, Michael, Meyer, Eric T., Cobo, Cristobal, Schroeder, Ralph, Álvarez, Federico, editor, Cleary, Frances, editor, Daras, Petros, editor, Domingue, John, editor, Galis, Alex, editor, Garcia, Ana, editor, Gavras, Anastasius, editor, Karnourskos, Stamatis, editor, Krco, Srdjan, editor, Li, Man-Sze, editor, Lotz, Volkmar, editor, Müller, Henning, editor, Salvadori, Elio, editor, Sassen, Anne-Marie, editor, Schaffers, Hans, editor, Stiller, Burkhard, editor, Tselentis, Georgios, editor, Turkama, Petra, editor, and Zahariadis, Theodore, editor

Published
2012
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14. Networked cultural production: filmmaking in the Wreckamovie community

Author

Hjorth, I, Hjorth, Isis Amelie, Meyer, E, and Eynon, R

Subjects
Sociology, Internet and everyday life, Internet research
Abstract

This thesis challenges core assumptions associated with the peer production of culture using the web-based collaborative film production platform Wreckamovie to understand how peer production works in practice. Active cultural participation is a growing political priority for many governments and cultural bodies, but these priorities are often implemented without a basis in empirical evidence, making it necessary for rigorous scholarship to tackle emerging networked cultural production. Existing work portrays peer production efforts as unrealistically distinct from proprietary, market-based production, incorrectly suggesting that peer production allows distributed, non-monetarily motivated, collaboration between self-selected individuals in hierarchy-free communities. In overcoming these assumptions, this thesis contributes to the development of a consolidated theoretical framework encompassing the complicated and multifaceted nature of networked cultural production. This theoretical framing extends Bourdieu’s theory of cultural production and reconciles it with Becker’s Art Worlds framework, and further embeds and draws on Benkler’s notion of commons-based peer production. Concretely, this research tackles the emergence of new collaborative production models enabled by networked technologies, and theorizes the tensions and challenges characterizing such production forms. Secondly, this thesis redefines cultural participation and considers the divisions of labour in online filmmaking materializing from the interactions between professional and non-professional filmmakers. Finally, this study considers the social economies surrounding networked cultural production, including crowdfunding, and characterizes associated conversions of capital, such as the conversion of symbolic capital into financial capital. Methodologically, this thesis employs an embedded case study strategy. It examines four feature film productions facilitated by the online platform Wreckamovie, as well as the online community within which these productions are embedded. The four production cases have completed all production stages, and have resulted in completed cultural goods during the course of data collection. This study’s findings were derived from two and half years of participant observations, interviews with 29 Wreckamovie community and production members, and the examination of archived production-related discourses (2006-2013). Ultimately, this study makes concrete proposals towards a theory of networked cultural production with clear policy implications.

Published
2016

16. The Global Platform Economy: A New Offshoring Institution Enabling Emerging-Economy Microproviders.

Author

Lehdonvirta, Vili, Kässi, Otto, Hjorth, Isis, Barnard, Helena, and Graham, Mark

Subjects
TRANSACTION cost theory of the firm, ELECTRONIC commerce, TRANSACTION records, BUSINESS records, SMALL business
Abstract

Global online platforms match firms with service providers around the world, in services ranging from software development to copywriting and graphic design. Unlike in traditional offshore outsourcing, service providers are predominantly one-person microproviders located in emerging-economy countries not necessarily associated with offshoring and often disadvantaged by negative country images. How do these microproviders survive and thrive? We theorize global platforms through transaction cost economics (TCE), arguing that they are a new technology-enabled offshoring institution that emerges in response to cross-border information asymmetries that hitherto prevented microproviders from participating in offshoring markets. To explain how platforms achieve this, we adapt signaling theory to a TCE-based model and test our hypotheses by analyzing 6 months of transaction records from a leading platform. To help interpret the results and generalize them beyond a single platform, we introduce supplementary data from 107 face-to-face interviews with microproviders in Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. Individuals choose microprovidership when it provides a better return on their skills and labor than employment at a local (offshoring) firm. The platform acts as a signaling environment that allows microproviders to inform foreign clients of their quality, with platform-generated signals being the most informative signaling type. Platform signaling disproportionately benefits emerging-economy providers, allowing them to partly overcome the effects of negative country images and thus diminishing the importance of home country institutions. Global platforms in other factor and product markets likely promote cross-border microbusiness through similar mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published
2019
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20. Online Labour Markets and the Persistence of Personal Networks:Evidence From Workers in Southeast Asia.

Author

Lehdonvirta, Vili, Hjorth, Isis, and Graham, Mark

Abstract

Changes to the nature of work and employment relations in the past few decades have in large part been driven by value chain restructuring, or the outsourcing and offshoring of work. The material basis for these changes is in many cases provided by digital information and communication technologies (ICTs). We examine an extreme example of ICT-enabled service value chain restructuring: online labour markets, or sites that bring together buyers and sellers of digitally mediated service work around the world. We ask in what ways the Internet and online labour markets specifically are reconfiguring service trade value chains, and with what effects on the nature of work. We report initial results from a 3-month period of fieldwork among online workers in locations in Southeast Asia, one of the prime destinations of offshored service work. Results are presented in the form of a typology of five patterns: bridging, disintermediation, reintermediation, local lengthening, and horizontal collaboration. As expected in the policy discourse, online labour markets function as bridges that allow workers in low-income countries to obtain work from clients in high-income countries. But contrary to expectations, they also give rise to new intermediaries and hierarchies, suggesting that there are non-technological limits to marketization and that personal networks continue to matter, even in digital work mediated through digital marketplaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Published
2015

22. Digital labour and development: impacts of global digital labour platforms and the gig economy on worker livelihoods.

Author

Graham M, Hjorth I, and Lehdonvirta V

Abstract

As ever more policy-makers, governments and organisations turn to the gig economy and digital labour as an economic development strategy to bring jobs to places that need them, it becomes important to understand better how this might influence the livelihoods of workers. Drawing on a multi-year study with digital workers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South-east Asia, this article highlights four key concerns for workers: bargaining power, economic inclusion, intermediated value chains, and upgrading. The article shows that although there are important and tangible benefits for a range of workers, there are also a range of risks and costs that unduly affect the livelihoods of digital workers. Building on those concerns, it then concludes with a reflection on four broad strategies - certification schemes, organising digital workers, regulatory strategies and democratic control of online labour platforms - that could be employed to improve conditions and livelihoods for digital workers.

Published
2017
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