Abstract
In addition to supporting immediate instructional objectives, online learning environments can enable participants to gain value from a network of scholars and resources. This potential value in a technology-mediated network has been termed socio-technical capital. Our software, Prometheus, is being used to support online university level education under an open community model inspired by this idea. The analysis reported in this chapter examines the extent to which people who come to the online environment for instrumental objectives such as taking a course encounter persons or products of others from outside their course workspace. Various digital media available in Prometheus – discussions, resources, user profiles, and wiki pages – are compared in terms of how they support these encounters. Results show that there is appreciable bridging across classes and programs, and that the effectiveness of media for socio-technical capital depends on whether they are owned by task-specific workspaces.
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Acknowledgments
The authors gratefully acknowledge our team members cited as co-authors above for their contributions to these ideas over the years. We especially thank Sam Joseph for design and implementation of the Prometheus code base, and Viil Lid for community interface design. This work was funded by NSF grants #0100393 and #0943147. Authors may be contacted at suthers@hawaii.edu and karhai@hawaii.edu.
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Suthers, D.D., Chu, KH. (2012). Mediators of Socio-technical Capital in a Networked Learning Environment. In: Dirckinck-Holmfeld, L., Hodgson, V., McConnell, D. (eds) Exploring the Theory, Pedagogy and Practice of Networked Learning. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-0496-5_4
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