Glossary Terms

Avatar: An identity or representation created of an individual on the internet. It could take several forms, from 3Dimensional like the ones created on Second Life, to 2Dimensional like pictures individuals use on facebook, or one-dimensional which is usually a representation on an individual on a wiki or forums. According to Boon and Sinclair, they defined avatars as "the digital expression of self in the expansive digital world" (20).

Blog: "A website, similar to an online journal, that includes chronological entries made by individuals. The word blog was derived from the combination of the word web and log. Blogs typically focus on a specific subject (Economy, entertainment news, etc.) and provide users with forums (or a comment area) to talk about each posting. Many people use blogs as they would a personal journal or diary" (BusinessDictionary).

Captology : is a newly coined term, meaning "the study of Computers As Persuasive Technology (CAPT-ology)." (Shaffer,John)

Collective intelligence: Describes “how groups of individuals can occasionally and under particular circumstances meld their thinking into a coherent whole” (Smith, 1).

CoPs are: “groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis” (Gunawardena, 6).

Civic Engagement: “Participation in voluntary organizations and political activities affords
opportunities for people to bond, create joint accomplishments, and collectively articulate their
demands (Curtis, Baer & Grabb, 2001; Eckstein, 2001; Schofer & Fourcade-Gourinchas, 2001;
Tilly, 1984). Such civic engagement is the public side of community”(Haase and Wellman, 6).

Digital Rhetoric: is all of the following: "a new form of communication composed, created, and distributed through new technologies; the processes of effectively conveying information digitally;the use of digital technology to enhance a reader/audience/user’s comprehension of a message; the art of informing, persuading, and inspiring action in an audience through digital media; the way people present ideas in a way that makes sense in a digital form (i.e., on screen, on video, through audio);
a conscious awareness of the fact that choices to incorporate or exclude different digital elements affects your message to the audience, and experimentation with ways to improve the effect; the ways that reading and writing practices and the dynamics between writers and readers change when text moves online; the study of rules of composition with and through digital technologies or digital writing conventions; the exploration of the dynamics of an argument through the use of digital elements, such as interactive hyperlinks, visuals, audio files, etc.; and the analysis of the details of a digitally formed piece of information, such as the use of space, the color scheme, and the interactive elements in order to understand how to improve an argument or message" ("A Definition of Digital Rhetoric).

Discourse: "Gee (1996) defines discourse as a “socially accepted association among ways of using
language, other symbolic expressions, and ‘artifacts’ of thinking, feeling, believing, valuing, and acting that can be used to identify oneself as a member of a socially meaningful group…." (Gunawardena 10). It also the space of negotiation produced as a result of authoritative dicourse such as scholarly material, and pre-existing theories of knowledge.

Domain: "Represents common ground where participants share ideas, knowledge and stories" (Gunawardena, 6).

Dystopia: The argument that internet lures people away from their in-person activities, communities and informed discussions

Folksonomy or Tagging: “facilitate knowledge management. Tagging essentially provides users with a method of organizing the knowledge they build by creating textual tags, which they attach to any given resource”. “They are automatically organized by the system or website, and thus provide new and existing users with a method of navigating the database” (Gunawardena, 13).

Forum: an Internet discussion group for participants with common interests. (Encarta Online Dictionary).

Group-mediated cognition (GMC) is " used by Smith (1994) to describe the form of situated thinking whereby the thinking of each individual is inevitably influenced by the thinking of the other members taking part in the activity, even if it is only to disagree" (Gunawardena 10).

Group Zone of proximal development: - "Galbraith, and Renshaw (2002)… define this peer collaboration as “mutality,” an interactive process encompassing varied reasoning andviewpoints that builds a shared understanding of the learning goal" (Gunawardena 9).

Idioculture: "An idioculture is a system of knowledge, beliefs, behaviors, and customs shared by members of an interacting group to which members can refer and that serve as the basis of further interaction. Members recognize that they share experiences, and these experiences can be referred to with the expectation they will be understood by other members, thus being used to construct a reality for the participants. (Fine, 1987, p. 125, cited in Cole & Engestrom, 2007)" (Gunawardena, 7).

Information security: "means that people are free to determine what information about themselves they want to share with others."(Barnes)

Internet Utopia: The claim that the internet is providing new and better ways of engaging in community and finding information.

Mutuality: "The reciprocal process of exploring each other's reasoning and viewpoints in order to construct a shared understanding"(Gunawardena, 14-15). In relation to digital rhetoric, especially in educational context, mutuality often implies, a new type of interaction; interdependence between professor and student. No longer is the content or instruction centralized on the professor's side but is a collaborative, grassroots, interaction between students and professors to generate content (i.e. ideas, projects, learning strategies.) The instructor’s role is also to help guide the lesson. This could be said to resemble the new age wave of networking, where the connections are less and less client-server mode; where one server serves multiple clients, but instead are peer to peer(P2P), where all nodes are working, participating and the server, if present, helps facilitates that interaction.

Network Capital: “The frequency of social contact with friends, relatives, and workmates.
This is the private side of community”( Haase and Wellman, 5) .

Privacy Paradox: " The way by which teenagers reveal their beleifs, thoughts and private information online and governments, institutions and markets collects this personal data." (Barnes)

Panopticon: "An architechtual design that allows prisoners to be monitored by prisoners."(Barnes)

Privacy: " Freedom from unauthorized instrusion one's right to privacy." (Nguyen,119)

Second Life: It is an online simulation where users, referred to as Residents, create a virtual identity for themselves through an avatar and interact with one another through these avatars, socialize, and engage in group activities. Second Life had existed for quite a while now, but evolved from simply being a social software networking to a tool used in Higher Education between students and professors. (Boon, Stuart and Christine Sinclair, "A World I Dont Inhabit: Disquiet and Identity In Second Life and Faebook")

Self-efficacy: “The effect of an individual’s perceived abilities on his or her behavior" in terms of contribution to an online environment. "The less confident a person is in his or her abilities, the less likely he or she is to engage in the behavior” of adding substantively to the content of the medium, whether it be extra knowledge or any input (Gunawardna, 10).

Sense of Community: is described in relation to social capital, or even equated to it ; “Social capital consists of more than interpersonal interaction and civic engagement. When people have a strong attitude toward community – a motivated and responsible sense of belonging – they… mobilize their social capital more willingly and effectively (Tilly, 1984; Diani & McAdam, 2002). This is the attitudinal side of community” (Haase and Wellman, 6).

Social bookmarking systems: “Del.icio.us and Bibsonomy are categorized as social book marking” (Gunawardena 5). “They allow users to create lists of ‘bookmarks’ or ‘favourites’, to store these centrally on a remote service (rather than within the client browser) and to share them with other users of the system (the ‘social’ aspect). These bookmarks can also be tagged with keywords” (Paul Anderson, 9).

Social Constructionism: "The belief that the world is shaped by the dialogue and discourse we have on one another" (Gunawardena, 7).

Social Media: an umbrella term that covers media that support social collaborations, such as social networking and social software. It encompasses both the mediums used and the action itself. (Barnes).

Social Networking: is the practice of expanding knowledge by making connections with individuals of similar interests. It is also linked to technological services and software that make it possible for people to communicate with others from anywhere, at any time. This process takes place over social networking sites which are online spaces that can be customized to a large extent by their users, providing space for personal profiles, which users complete in order to make connections with others (Gunawardena, 2).

Social Networking Technology:" Tools that facilitate collective intelligence through a social negotiation when participants are engaged in common goal or shared practice" (Gunawardena,6).

Social Phishing: "Phishing is a form of deception in which an attacker attempts to fraudulently acquire sensitive information from a victim by impersonating a trustworthy entity" (Jagatic, 94).

Social Web: “(is) the second incarnation of the Web (Web 2.0)"; meaning that social web is another term for web 2.0. Social web is characterized by that ,“in contrast to Web 1.0, its content can be more easily generated and published by users, and the collective intelligence of users encourages more democratic use” (Gunwardena, 4).

Virtual Community: "Frontierless, geographically dispersed community of people and organizations connected via internet or other networks. Also called online community or web community" (businessdictionary)

Virtual Identity: Virtual is "[h]aving most properties , the appearance, the essence, or effet of something without being that thing" *BusinessDictionary). Hence, a virtual identity is the interface one uses to communicate between him/her own real self with the rest of virtual identities online, referred to as virtual community (defined below).

Web surfing: It is the only internet activity with appreciable differences. No other personal characteristics is appreciably associated with the frequency of the surfing the web.

Wiki: “A collective intelligence tool that enables collaborative editing of documents on the web. A wiki is a website that users can customize with controls that resemble a word processor’s interface” (Gunawardena, 5).

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