Are There Different Trends in Members’ Use of Feedback Functions about Interactions?: Focusing on the HighNyammer Social Scanner

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the differences in how members of a community get information about their colleagues. To do so, we developed the HighNyammer Social Scanner, which visualizes summative results of members’ activities on a computer bulletin board system (BBS) used in a community. In the Social Scanner, three types of visualization functions were implemented: a chart of yearly changes in each member’s betweenness centrality values, all members’ betweenness centrality values in a week, and relationships among members in a week. The numerical values in each chart obtained by the social network analysis regarding the interaction of members were provided as feedback to each member in real time. How often they accessed this visualized feedback was examined. We analyzed the activities of seven members in a community that operates an active learning classroom on a BBS with Social Scanner for nine months. The log data of the members’ use of a BBS suggested that the members could be divided into two categories based on the trends of their use of Social Scanner: those who continuously used the visualization function, and those who only used the function at the beginning of term, when the function was provided. The possibility was raised that members who continuously invoked the function were continuously interested in their colleagues’ states as well.