Ben Kei Daniel

With advances in communication technology and online pedagogy, virtual learning communities have become rich learning environments in which individuals construct knowledge and...

Over the last decade, virtual communities have evolved from massive experimental, educational, technological, business, and social environments to experiential and practical...

The growth of virtual communities and their continuous impact on social, economic and technological structures of societies has attracted a great deal of interest among...

This chapter presents a Bayesian Belief computational model of social capital (SC) developed within the context of virtual communities. The development of the model was based on...

Drawing from previous research, this chapter presents major challenges associated with the analysis of interaction patterns in informal virtual communities. Using social network...

To understand the nature of formal virtual learningcommunities in higher education, we are employing a variety of user-centred evaluation approaches to...

Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) are increasingly used for understanding and simulating computational models in many domains. Though BBN techniques are elegant ways of capturing...

With advances in communication technology and online pedagogy, virtual learning communities have become rich learning environments in which individuals construct knowledge and...

Throughout history, the permeation of new technologies have assisted communities in their aim to collectively work together in addressing shared problems for the attainment of...

This chapter examines current research on online learning communities (OLCs), with the aim of identifying user-centered design (UCD) principles critical to the emergence and...

Communities are important social systems accountable for sustainability and continuity of humanity. They provide a variety of support to their members, ranging from physical to...

Social capital is a complex multifaceted and litigious theory, discussed in the Social Sciences and the Humanities. It is a theory increasingly researchers questioned its...

Despite lack of meticulousness, social capital continues to occupy a central position in many discussions about community, trust and social networks. The multidimensionality and...

While it is possible to measure how much an economic capital is worth, at least in terms of monetary value, through the use of sophisticated econometric tools, while conditioning...

Regardless of any approach taken for examining social capital, researchers continuously converge on some key issues such as trust and yet diverge on several others about concrete...

The World Wide Web is one of the most profound technological inventions of our time and is the core to the development of social computing. The initial purpose of the Web was to...

The growth of virtual communities and their continuous impact on social, economic and technological structures of societies has attracted a great deal of interest among...

Knowledge management and knowledge sharing are topics best addressed in a different book. This Chapter is intentionally introduced in the book to introduce the reader to...

A model is an abstract representation of reality. It can be an object, a system or an idea. In general terms, one could say that a model is a simplification of reality. Modeling...

Statistical and probability inferences are basically dependent on two major methods of reasoning, conventional (frequentist) and Bayesian probability. Frequentists’ methods are...

Bayesian Belief Networks (BBNs) are increasingly used for understanding different problems in many domains. Though BBN techniques are elegant ways of capturing uncertainties...

This Chapter presents the Bayesian Belief computational model of social capital developed within the context of virtual communities discussed in Chapter 7. The development of the...

Sensitivity analysis is a mathematical technique for investigating the effects of inaccuracies in the parameters of a mathematical model. It analyses how variation in the output...

Though computational models take a lot of effort to build, a model is generally not useful unless it can help people to understand the world being modelled, or the problem the...

Social capital in virtual communities offers a useful conceptual and practical tool to help us gain insights into the way people interact with each other, share information and...

This chapter aims to introduce user-centered design and its basic concepts associated with online learning communities. Another aim is to search for guidelines to ensure quality...

This chapter examines current research on online learning communities (OLCs), with aim of identifying User-Centred Design (UCD) principles critical to the emergence and...

Bayesian belief networks (BBNs) are increasingly used for understanding and simulating computational models in many domains. Though BBN techniques are elegant ways of capturing...

To understand the nature of formal virtual learning communities in higher education, we are employing a variety of user-centred evaluation approaches to examine methods for...

This chapter examines current research on online learning communities (OLCs), with aim of identifying User-Centred Design (UCD) principles critical to the emergence and...