Professor Steven Warburton

The rise of social software and the proliferation of social networking tools represents a relatively recent cultural phenomenon. The attitudes and behaviors of virtual communities and social groups goes beyond the distributed technological platforms being deployed and requires new conceptualizations and understandings of communities and their corresponding ontologies. The Handbook of Research on Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies examines the impact of new technologies and explores how social software and developing community ontologies are challenging the way we operate in a connected, distributed, and increasingly performative space. Through authoritative contributions by a vast group of international experts in this subject area, this book provides important new insights into where new social technologies and emergent behaviors are leading us. © 2009 by IGI Global. All rights reserved.

Laying the foundation for productive interaction and participation within synchronous text based chat sessions.

This pattern addresses the mechanics of synchronous text-based chat sessions for effective communication within online teaching sessions.

When working in a virtual teaching environment one of the challenges is to understand the way that the available communication channels map out space differently to how we imagine real-world spaces.

Despite its negative connotations, lurking is a valid activity for individuals entering an unfamiliar online social space, especially when deciding how to present themselves and their identity online. Providing the space and time for individuals to acclimatise to extant social rules and behaviours is an important design consideration. This chapter outlines key issues surrounding non-participative behaviour in online social spaces and describes the participatory design pattern approach that was used to develop a transferable solution to this recurring problem in the form of a design pattern. © 2013, IGI Global.

This chapter describes an exploratory study in the use of the virtual world Second Life as an innovative space for situating collaborative activity in the field of art and design. The authors identify eight key affordances of Second Life for learning and teaching and elaborate the educational approach based on group orientated design briefs, carried out over a three-week period by the students. The results of the study reveal both the negative and positive aspects of using Second Life as an educational space. These range from access difficulties and the steep learning curve in becoming familiar with the technology, to the expansive social and creative freedoms that the world allows. The conclusions draw together an analysis of the emerging themes and present a set of ten good practices for developing and running successful collaborative activities inside virtual worlds. © 2010, IGI Global.

A design pattern approach, in the form of participatory pattern workshops, has been used to explore the design approaches that experts in the field of online learning have used to develop and deliver Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). Over the course of 3 intensive workshops a total of 20 design patterns were developed from shared narratives of successful practice. These patterns describe solutions to problems that are contextualised to six design dimensions: structure; orientation; participation; learning; community and management. The validity of these patterns has been tested against novel design challenges. In this paper, we present the 20 design patterns as a scaffold for both novice and expert developers to build a MOOC and suggest that integrating design patterns into a simple iterative design cycle can provide a powerful course development approach.

In order to promote pedagogically informed use of technology, educators need to develop an active, inquisitive, design-oriented mindset. Design Patterns have been demonstrated as powerful mediators of theory-praxis conversations yet widespread adoption by the practitioner community remains a challenge. Over several years, the authors and their colleagues have facilitated many workshops in which participants shared experiences, captured these as design narratives, extracting design patterns, and applied them to novel teaching challenges represented as design scenarios. This paper presents the core elements of the methodology that emerged from these workshops: the Participatory Patterns Workshops (PPW) methodology. © Y. Mor et al.