Lecture Series
9/18/07 - Doug Thomas, Ph.D
Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California
"Understanding the gamer disposition: What games can teach us in the 21st century"
While games may provide valuable tools for teaching, their true power lies in their ability to create and generate complex learning environments. This talk will examine the ways in which players develop and utilize particular dispositional stances for navigating and taking advantage of new and complex economies of knowledge and how those dispositions may translate into new skill sets necessary for the 21st century.
9/24/07 - Utpal (Paul) Dholakia, Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Management, Jesse H. Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University
"Long-term effects of customer community participation: Evidence from eBay Germany"
Although customer community programs are becoming increasingly popular as a means of creating and strengthening connections with customers, many researchers and practitioners view them to be niche programs, suitable only for engaging extreme fans of the brand. In cooperation with eBay Germany, we conducted a two-year long investigation involving 140,120 active eBay customers to examine whether customer community programs can be used in the mainstream to increase relational behaviors of core customers, who are active and involved, but are not extreme in their connections with the brand to begin with.
Active eBay users were randomly assigned to either receive invitations to participate in eBay's customer communities or not. We tracked community participation, buying and selling behaviors of all these users for a period of 2 years afterward. We also conducted surveys with a sub-set of these users (N = 4,779), and had another subset (N = 3,579) participate in one-shot, two-stage, third-party investment games employing an experimental economics paradigm.
Our results provide strong evidence that customer communities are much more than niche marketing programs; they can be targeted toward a firm's mainstream customers to increase their emotional connections with the brand, raise their trust for the firm and its other customers, and increase their relational behaviors. We also examine the information- and site-related characteristics that increase the influence of community on relational
customer behaviors.
10/8/07 - Judith Donath Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Media Arts & Sciences, The Media Laboratory, Massachussetts Institute of Technology
"Virtually trustworthy: Signaling intention and identity in online communication"
In this talk I will discuss how avatars, social networks, and personal visualizations inspire trust - and if and when they actually indicate trustworthiness.
2/25/08 - Yasmin Kafai Ph.D.
Associate Professor of Learning and Instruction, UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
"Pathways into Participation: Cheating Practices and Designs for Learning in Virtual Worlds"
In a time when technologies are ubiquitous, the digital divide appears to be a problem of the past. While many youth have access to numerous digital outlets, the participation gap appears to be the new challenge: What does it mean today to competently participate in the digital public? In my talk, I will present and discuss the example of cheat sites and cheating practices associated with Whyville.net, a virtual world with over 2.5 million registered players ages 8-16 that includes casual science games. I will review the nature and design of cheat sites, the quality and quantity of their science content, and the discussions in over a hundred player-written articles about the practices and impact of cheating. The practices and designs associated with cheating can serve as illustrations of the technical, critical, creative, and ethical aspects needed for participating in today's digital public.
3/3/08 - Nicole Ellison, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media, Michigan State University
"Initiating, maintaining, and information-seeking: Facebook connection practices and their social capital implications"
This presentation will describe findings from a three-year, multi-method research project examining Facebook, a social network site wildly popular with undergraduate students. Utilizing a combination of survey, interview, and web crawling methodologies, our project focuses on the social capital implications of Facebook use and the ways in which the site is used to maintain and initiate relationships. Findings suggest that certain kinds of Facebook use are associated with increases in bridging social capital, perhaps due to the specific social and technical affordances of Facebook which enable users to maintain larger and more heterogeneous social networks.
