Jonathan Bishop

Web-based communities have been an interest of social science researchers since the dawn of the millennium. To date, much research into them has focused on the methods to enhance community building and understand those who do not participate in community life, known as lurkers. This paper explores web-based communities as a type of media, classifying types of web-based community such as message boards, chat groups and weblogs as genres. A methodology is proposed based on the Ecological Cognition Framework (ECF) for reading these web-based communities in order to determine their genre and subgenre. Utilising both quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the images, text and other artefacts in these web-based communities, two specific subgenres of the weblogs and directories genre emerge as the political blog and the mommy blog and these are compared with the significant differences that are found between them that make them solid subgenres.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2009). Enhancing the understanding of genres of web-based communities: The role of the ecological cognition framework. International Journal of Web-Based Communities, 5(1)

Online dating is a big business, allowing people from the comfort of their own home to view and read about potential mates all around the world. Different dating sites offer different services. However, it is not yet commonplace for Web sites dedicated to dating to use the social networking tools used by popular online communities, such as those that use the personal homepage and message board genres. The ecological cognition framework (ECF) provides a theoretical model regarding online dating communities’ behavior and relationship development. A model based on the ECF is proposed and provides a basis for developing online dating services that effectively support relationship development. Two investigations are presented in this chapter, one that uses a case study approach to identify and describe online dating services from the perspective of a specific case and another that assess the effectiveness of existing online dating services based on the guidelines developed from the case study. The case study provides a useful insight into the nature of social networking from the perspective of a specific case, which led to guidelines for developing e-dating systems that when evaluated showed that the most popular social networking services also score well against the criteria proposed in those guidelines.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2008). Understanding and facilitating the development of social networks in online dating communities: A case study and model. In C. Romm-Livermore, & K. Setzekorn (Eds.), Social networking communities and EDating services: Concepts and implications. New York: IGI Global.

The rise of online communities in Internet environments has set in motion an unprecedented shift in power from vendors of goods and services to the customers who buy them, with those vendors who understand this transfer of power and choose to capitalize on it by organizing online communities and being richly rewarded with both peerless customer loyalty and impressive economic returns. A type of online community, the virtual world, could radically alter the way people work, learn, grow consume, and entertain. Understanding the exchange of social and economic capital in online communities could involve looking at what causes actors to spend their resources on improving someone else’s reputation. Actors’ reputations may affect others’ willingness to trade with them or give them gifts. Investigating online communities reveals a large number of different characters and associated avatars. When an actor looks at another’s avatar they will evaluate them and make decisions that are crucial to creating interaction between customers and vendors in virtual worlds based on the exchange of goods and services. This chapter utilizes the ecological cognition framework to understand transactions, characters and avatars in virtual worlds and investigates the exchange of capital in a bulletin board and virtual. The chapter finds strong evidence for the existence of characters and stereotypes based on the ecological cognition framework and empirical evidence that actors using avatars with antisocial connotations are more likely to have a lower return on investment and be rated less positively than those with more sophisticated appearing avatars.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2008). Increasing capital revenue in social networking communities: Building social and economic relationships through avatars and characters. In C. Romm-Livermore, & K. Setzekorn (Eds.), Social networking communities and eDating services: Concepts and implications. New York: IGI Global.

This paper proposes a modification to the star lifecycle to make it suitable for designing e-learning communities.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2007). Evaluation-centred design of E-learning communities: A case study and review. In V. Grout, D. Oram & R. Picking (Eds.), Proceedings of the second international conference on internet technologies and applications (ITA07 ed., pp. 1-9). Wrexham: University of Wales Press.

This dissertation focuses on the main aspects of EU law affecting the e-learning industry and of particular interest to Jonathan were competition law and intellectual property law, including copyright and third-party intellectual property rights (TPIP) issues.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2007). An investigation into how the European Union affects the development and provision of e-learning services. LLM Thesis. Pontypridd, UK: University of Glamorgan.

Online communities are becoming an accepted part of the lives of Internet users, although participation in these communities is dependent on the types of people that form them. Some of the online community’s members do not participate, people referred to as lurkers, whereas others who have been in the community for a long time, referred to as elders, participate regularly and support others. Understanding what drives these individuals and how they chose whether or not to participate will lead to online communities that thrive. This paper proposes a conceptual framework to describe what drives such individuals to carry out actions such as posting messages and adding content (level 1), the cognitions they use to determine whether or not to take such actions (level 2) and the means by which they go about carrying out the action in the environment (level 3). Finally, the framework is applied to the problem of encouraging members to participate by discussing the methods by which people can be persuaded to participate by changing the way they interpret their desires and their environment.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2007). Increasing participation in online communities: A framework for human–computer interaction. Computers in Human Behavior, 23(4), 1881-1893.

E-learning systems are becoming commonplace in the networked classroom, as educators search for new ways of engaging their learners. Traditional methods of designing these systems have focussed the tasks users are likely to complete as opposed to designing them to persuade the user to develop knowledge or learn about topics. Successful e-learning systems allow the user to interact with the environment using mediating artefacts, which are conductors for action within these environments. Mediating artefact take many forms, in Internet applications they often manifest in the form of text that offers the perceived affordance of clicking, whereas in graphical environments they are often icons that offer the perceived affordance of dragging. Many e-learning systems are based around mediating artefacts, but few of these have been designed to encourage learners to carry actions in order to meet their goals. This paper investigates how mediating artefacts can be made persuasive and suggests a scenario-based design model to aid developers in making e-learning systems persuasive and orientated around the goals of learners.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2005). The role of mediating artefacts in the design of persuasive e-learning systems. Paper accepted for presentation at the Internet Technologies and Applications 2005 Conference, September 2005, Wrexham, UK.

This article discusses the structure of virtual communities and why people participate in them. It investigates the reasons why people participate in these virtual environments and what shape they may take in the future.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2003). Factors shaping the form of and participation in online communities. Digital Matrix, 85(2003), 22-24.

Investigates the market models available to
central government and how intervention in these
markets affects the level of choice parents have in
deciding how their children are educated. Reviews
the interventions by central government in the
past few decades and the effect of devolved
regional government on the school market. Finds
that the greater amount of choice and competition
that has formed part of the rhetoric of
governments in the UK in the past few decades
can only be achieved if all parents have perfect
information. Concludes that if genuine choice is to
be realised then central government will have to
limit the number of non-homogeneous schools in
the market and increase the amount of
information available to parents through devolving
responsibility for providing education to
democratically accountable regional assemblies.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2003). The microeconomics of education and the effect of government intervention. Poliphony 151 (2003), 13-17.

Investigates the social and practical implications of using Internet technology to deliver information relating to participation in a social situation.

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Cite as: Bishop, J. (2003). The Internet for educating individuals with social impairments. Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 19 (4), 546-556.