International Journal of Web Based Communities  (IJWBC)

Call For papers

Special Issue on: "Web 2.0 Goes Academia: Innovative Scenarios for Socio-technical Communities"

Guest Editor: Isa Jahnke, Dortmund University of Technology, Germany

Web 2.0 is – as O’Reilly (2005) said – a “second generation of Internet-based services”. The common idea is to enable people to collaborate and share information online in new ways, such as in wikis, communication tools, social networking applications, and social tagging. Figure 1 confronts the two concepts and lists examples from Web 2.0 usage in academia.

Web 2.0 and Social Software focus on new or existing software systems which are influenced by human communication and collaboration, or, to put it another way, Web 2.0 is heavily reliant on social interaction, and so social web-based applications generate and require a human-centred design approach.

The number of users of Web 2.0 applications in private settings (e.g., leisure) is very high. However, in organisations and institutions, Web 2.0 concepts or such combined applications are still at an early stage. The same is true for universities. There are some Web 2.0 tools in universities, in particular Wikis and Blogs, but the usage of these tools for supporting teaching, learning or research is not yet fully developed. How can Web 2.0 support community-based learning or research processes in academia?

The aim is to collect proposals for academic practice with Web 2.0, to specify research questions dealing with Web 2.0 in academia or to discuss new research methods and their challenges in this topic (e.g., e-ethnography). The special issue wants to share practical experience or research results about using Web 2.0 in teaching and research, for example, e-learning goes Web 2.0, scientific communities go Web 2.0 or research publications go Web 2.0. Therefore, we strongly encourage researchers and practitioners who have ideas or experience of using Web 2.0 applications in academia to submit a paper.

   Subject Coverage

Research questions the special issue will focus include, but are not limited to:

• What Web 2.0 applications exist in universities, in research or in learning?
• Do Web 2.0 applications in academia make a difference to existing Internet applications like email, content management systems or newsgroups?
• Do you have success stories or success criteria of Web 2.0 usage in academic fields?
• What changes are observable or essential when introducing Web 2.0 concepts in teaching or research settings?
• How can we introduce Web 2.0 applications in the academic world?
• What is the negative side of Web 2.0 in Academia with respect to plagiarism and "Wikipedia-only" references in student theses?

   Notes for Prospective Authors

Submitted papers should not have been previously published nor be currently under consideration for publication elsewhere

All papers are refereed through a peer review process. A guide for authors, sample copies and other relevant information for submitting papers are available on the Author Guidelines page

   Important Dates

Deadline for paper submission: 3 August 2008

NEW Deadline for notifications (accepted / rejected papers): 8 December, 2008

   Editors and Notes

You may send one copy in the form of an MS Word file attached to an e-mail (details in Author Guidelines) to the following:

Dr Isa Jahnke
Assistant Professor for Institutional Research
Dortmund University of Technology
Center for Research on Higher Education and Faculty Development
44221 Dortmund
Germany
Email: isa.jahnke@tu-dortmund.de
Web site: http://www.hdz.uni-dortmund.de/index.php?id=276

with a copy to:

Editorial Office
E-mail: editorial@inderscience.com

Please include in your submission the title of the Special Issue, the title of the Journal and the name of the Guest Editor

ⁱ These examples are based on a 2-day workshop on Web2.0 in academia which was held in October 2007 by “Information and Technology Management” of the University of Bochum . The contributors were Angela Carell , Thomas Herrmann, Isa Jahnke , Kai-Uwe Loser , Michael Prilla , Carsten Ritterskamp , Isabel Schaller , Rainer Skrotzki and Marc Turnwald.

ⁱⁱ Pepysdiary.com site “is a presentation of the diaries of Samuel Pepys, the renowned 17th century diarist who lived in London , England . A new entry written by Pepys will be published each day over the course of several years; 1 January 1660 was published on 1 January 2003 ” (Retrieved September 9 th,, 2007 , from http://www.pepysdiary.com/). People discuss Pepys’ life and his diary entries by posting own annotations .

ⁱⁱⁱ Retrieved September 9 th,, 2007 , from http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/

^iv Netvibes is founded in 2005 and different to traditional Web portals. Netvibes “lets individuals assemble all in one place their favorite websites, blogs, email accounts, social networks, search engines, instant messengers, photos, videos, podcasts, widgets, and everything else they enjoy on the Web”. Retrieved December 17 th,, 2007 , from http://www.netvibes.com/

^v “BibSonomy is a system for sharing bookmarks and lists of literature. When discovering a bookmark or a publication on the web, you can store it on our server. You can add tags to your entry to retrieve it more easily.” Retrieved December 17 th,, 2007 , from http://www.bibsonomy.org/

^vi Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site. By using tags, people can organize their own bookmarks and see what other people with similar tags have. This supports the idea to find information from the Internet easier. “Tags are one-word descriptors that you can assign to your bookmarks on del.icio.us to help you organize and remember them. Tags are a little bit like keywords, but they're chosen by you, and they do not form a hierarchy. You can assign as many tags to a bookmark as you like and rename or delete the tags later. So, tagging can be a lot easier and more flexible than fitting your information into preconceived categories or folders.” Retrieved September 9 th,, 2007 , from http://del.icio.us/help/tags

^vii Dodgeball site helps to find friends when people are at different places: “Tell us where you are and we’ll send messages to all your friends letting them know, so you can meet up. (…) we’ll locate friends of friends within 10 blocks (…) find venue locations and broadcast messages to all your friends.” Retrieved September 9 th,, 2007 , from http://www.dodgeball.com/

^viii “Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you.” Retrieved September 9 th,, 2007 , from http://www.facebook.com/ Similar to Facebook (especially in USA ), Xing.com is popular in Europe .

Return to Figure 1