(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2014)
Pileggi, Hannah; Morrison, Briana; Bruckman, Amy S.
This descriptive study explores deliberate barriers to user
participation on the long-lived discussion site Metafilter.com.
Metafilter has been in continuous operation since its founding
in 1999, and at the time of this writing has around 12,000
active users. While many newer online sites appear eager to
eliminate barriers to participation and recruit as many new
members as possible, Metafilter charges a $5 fee to join and
has a mandatory one-week waiting period before new users
are allowed to post. In this paper, we explore both why these
barriers were imposed and why some users choose to surmount
the barriers to become members. Our data sources
include historical documents posted on the site, interviews
with eleven site members, an informal user survey, and an interview
with the Matt Haughey, the site’s founder and owner.
Implications of these design features are discussed.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2012)
Alvarado, Christine; Morrison, Briana; Ericson, Barbara; Guzdial, Mark; Miller, Brad; Ranum, David L.
Electronic books (ebooks) provide the opportunity to go beyond
the limitations of a physical page. These opportunities
are particularly important for computing education,
where dynamic information is a key characteristic of our domain.
An electronic book can provide opportunities to program
or conduct analyses that are impossible on the physical
page, integrating instructional information with creative
exploration. However, just because ebooks provide these
opportunities does not mean that we know how students
will actually use ebooks in the context of a class. Miller
and Ranum have produced an electronic book for teaching
introductory computing in Python. We explored how students
used the dynamic and novel features of the book, and
correlated that use with performance on learning measures.
We found that students made extensive use of the traditional
programming environment in the book, but that the lesser-used
visualization tool was better correlated with student
performance. In addition, we found that although students
reported high levels of satisfaction with the book, they appeared
to use it much like a traditional textbook, making
less use of many of the interactive features of the book than
we expected.