Success and sustainability of social networking sites is highly dependent on user participation. To encourage contribution to an opt-in social networking site designed for employees, we have designed and implemented a feature that rewards contribution with points. In our evaluation of the impact of the system, we found that employees are initially motivated to add more content to the site. This paper presents the analysis and design of the point system, the results of our experiment, and our insights regarding future directions derived from our post-experiment user interviews.

Abstract. Question answering communities (QA) are sustained by a handful of experts who provide a large number of high quality answers. Identifying these experts during the first few weeks of their joining the community can be beneficial as it would allow community managers to take steps to develop and retain these potential experts. In this paper, we explore approaches to identify potential experts as early as within the first two weeks of their association with the QA. We look at users' behavior and estimate their motivation and ability to help others. These qualities enable us to build classification and ranking models to identify users who are likely to become experts in the future. Our results indicate that the current experts can be effectively identified from their early behavior. We asked community managers to evaluate the potential experts identified by our algorithm and their analysis revealed that quite a few of these users were already experts or on the path of becoming experts. Our retrospective analysis shows that some of these potential experts had already left the community, highlighting the value of early identification and engagement.

Abstract.Closed corpus AH systems demonstrate what is possible to achieve with adaptive hypermedia technologies; however they are impractical for dealing with the large volume of open corpus resources. Our system, Knowledge Sea II, presented in this paper explores social adaptive navigation support, an approach for providing personalized guidance in the open corpus context. Following the ideas of social navigation, we have attempted to organize a personalized navigation support that is based on past learners' interaction with the system. The social adaptive navigation support implemented in our system was considered quite useful by students participating in the classroom study of Knowledge Sea II. At the same time, some user comments indicated the need to provide more powerful navigation support.

Abstract. The volume of course-related information available to students is rapidly increasing. This abundance of information has created the need to help students find, organize, and use resources that match their individual goals, interests, and current knowledge. Our system, CourseAgent, presented in this paper, is an adaptive community-based hypermedia system, which provides social navigation course recommendations based on students' assessment of course relevance to their career goals. CourseAgent obtains students' explicit feedback as part of their natural interactivity with the system. This work presents our approach to eliciting explicit student feedback and then evaluates this approach.

The existence and survival of online communities depends upon the commitment and retention of their members. This paper compares alternative ways of designing online sites to increase member commitment. We report the results of two experiments conducted within a Facebook game application. The results show that designs can increase commitment and retention of players either by visually highlighting individual members, or by emphasizing the community as a whole. These designs influence commitment through different routes.

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Web page annotation and adaptive navigation support are two active, but independent research directions focused on the same goal: expanding the functionality of the Web as a hypertext system. The goal of the AnnotatEd system presented in this paper has been to integrate annotation and adaptive navigation support into a single value-added service where the components can reinforce each other and create new unique attributes. This paper describes the implementation of AnnotatEd from early prototypes to the current version, which has been explored in several contexts. We summarize some lessons we learned during the development process and which defined the current functionality of the system. We also present the results of several classroom studies of the system. These results demonstrate the importance of the browsing-based information access supported by AnnotatEd and the value of both the annotation and navigation support functionalities offered by the system.

Web lectures are a form of educational content that differs from classic hypertext in a number of ways. Web lectures are easier to produce and therefore large amounts of material become accumulated in a short time. The recordings are significantly less structured than traditional web based learning content and they are time based media. Both the lack of structure and their time based nature pose difficulties for navigation in web lectures. The approach presented in this paper applies the basic concept of social navigation to facilitate navigation in web lectures. Social navigation support has been successfully employed for hypertext and picture augmented hypertext in the education domain. This paper describes how social navigation can be implemented for web lectures and how it can be used to augment existent navigation features.