Building creativity: collaborative learning and creativity in social media environments

Exploring the Factors That Influence the Intention to Co-create Open Educational Resources: A Social Exchange Theory Perspective

Purpose

Based on social exchange theory, this study aimed to investigate, from the cost-benefits perspective, the intention to co-create open educational resources (OER).

Design/Methodology/Approach

Participants in the study included 311 undergraduate students selected from those enrolled in a course on the China University MOOC platform. Regression analysis was conducted to examine cost and benefits factors that influenced participants’ intentions to co-create OER.

Findings

(1) From the perspective of benefits, expected reciprocity, increase in knowledge self-efficacy, and creative self-efficacy were found to significantly and positively impact the intention to co-create OER, while increase in internet self-efficacy was not. (2) From the perspective of cost, perceived effort and perceived privacy were found to significantly and negatively impact the intention to co-create OER, while perceived intellectual property risks were not significant.

Originality/Value

Three strategies are recommended to promote the intention to co-create OER based on the findings of this study: (1) focusing on OER communities and developing reciprocity norms; (2) popularizing and promoting knowledge and use of Creative Commons copyright licenses; (3) providing easy-to-use online resource editing tools for use with OER repositories.

Research Limitations/Implications

Future research should explore other ages, cultural backgrounds, and types of online learning experience to help broaden the universality of the results.

The Role of Social Media in an Inspirational Approach to Product Design and Designer Performance

Social media has encouraged a large number of organizations to design their work patterns to facilitate their employees through social media adoption. This study examines the effects of enterprise social media and public social media on the novelty-focused product design, and efficiency-focused product design that eventually explain the performance of the designers. Empirical analysis based on time-lagged, multi-source data set indicate that both enterprise social media and public social media are an important source of product designer's inspiration which are positively related to novelty-focused design and efficiency-focused product design. Results further indicate that efficiency-focused product design has a stronger impact on designer performance than novelty-focused design. Theoretical implications and practical implications are discussed in the later sections.

Collaborative idea exchange and material tinkering influence families’ creative engineering practices and products during engineering programs in informal learning environments

Purpose

This paper aims to investigate how families’ sociomaterial experiences in engineering programs held in libraries and a museum influence their creative engineering practices and the creativity expressed in their products derived from their inquiry-driven engineering activities.

Design/methodology/approach

This research project takes a naturalistic inquiry using qualitative and quantitative analyses based on video records from activities of 31 parent–child pairs and on creativity assessment of products that used littleBits as prototyping tools.

Findings

Families engaged in two sociomaterial experiences related to engineering – collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering with materials – which supported the emergence of novel ideas and feasible solutions during the informal engineering programs. Families in the high novelty score group experienced multiple instances of collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering with materials, co-constructed through parent-child collaboration, that were expansive toward further idea and solution generation. Families in the low novelty score group experienced brief collaborative idea exchange and material tinkering with specific idea suggestions and high involvement from the parent. An in-depth case study of one family further illustrated that equal engagement by the parent and child as they tinkered with the technology supported families’ creative engineering practices.

Originality/value

This analysis adds to the information sciences and learning sciences literatures with an account that integrates methodologies from sociocultural and engineering design research to understand the relationship between families’ engagement in creative engineering practices and their products. Implications for practitioners include suggestions for designing spaces to support families’ collaborative idea exchange and ongoing generative tinkering to facilitate the development of creative engineering practices during short-term engineering programs.

Social Media Responses to the Pandemic: What Makes a Coronavirus Meme Creative

The current pandemic and the measures taken to address it, on a global scale, are unprecedented. Times of crisis call for creative solutions, and these are not reduced to the work of scientists or politicians. In everyday life, both in online and offline spaces, people use their creativity to make sense of the current situation, to cope with it, and to learn its lessons. Social media is a privileged space for mundane and participative creativity through the production and sharing of coronavirus Internet memes. In this article, we examine the creativity of such memes from a dedicated Reddit community. We ask, in particular, what makes a coronavirus meme creative and what this creativity tells us about the pandemic and popular understandings of it. To answer these questions, we use a triangulation of quantitative and qualitative methods by having 480 memes coded by three social media users for surprise, meaningfulness, elaboration, humor, and creativity and qualitatively analyzing those memes that score highly on each dimension. An interesting finding concerns the importance of elaboration and humor for the evaluation of creativity in the case of memes, above the more traditional criteria of surprise (proxy for novelty) and meaningfulness (proxy for appropriateness), perhaps a feature unique for Internet spaces. The article ends with reflections on what these findings tell us about creativity on social media more generally and the creative processes involved in the generation and reception of coronavirus memes in particular.

Social media–based customer service and firm reputation

Purpose

This study investigates the effects of using social media for customer service on firms' reputation building. In addition, this study explores the role of absorptive capacity, ISO (International Organization for Standardization) 9,000 implementation and periodic training for management and employees in the relationship between social media–based customer service and firm reputation.

Design/methodology/approach

This study sampled 115 US-listed firms and collected secondary data from five databases as follows: Factiva, Fortune's World's Most Admired Companies (WMAC), Standard & Poor's COMPUSTAT, American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) and Thomson Reuters’ Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG). This study developed a panel dataset of these 115 firms from 2007 to 2016 and conducted dynamic panel data analyses to examine the hypotheses.

Findings

This study finds that a higher number of social media channels used for customer service is associated with a higher reputation score for a firm. In addition, the positive relationship is reinforced when a firm has a high absorptive capacity level, an ISO 9000 quality management system and offers periodic training for management and employees.

Originality/value

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to investigate the relationship between social media–based customer service and firm reputation. This study also explores the boundary factors in terms of firm absorptive capacity, ISO 9000 quality management systems and training for management and employees.

Successful customer knowledge management implementation through social media capabilities

Purpose

Nowadays, the recent advances in information and communications technology and the advent of Web 2.0 technology have resulted in the increasing popularity of social media and provided enterprises and companies with new horizons in establishing an effective significant relationship with clients. Despite the recognized importance of social media in knowledge management (KM) and customer relationships, there is not any research to identify social media capabilities related to customer knowledge management (CKM). Therefore, the purpose of this study is to recognize the social media capabilities related to CKM effectively.

Design/methodology/approach

To obtain research objectives, literature review, focus group method and expert interview were applied to identify and categorize social media capabilities. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) also used to prioritize capabilities important.

Findings

The results indicate social media capabilities such as conversation capability, sharing capability, groups/community capability, relationship capability, speed and ease of access for the public are the main capabilities related to exploit customer knowledge and manage it successfully.

Research limitations/implications

The results highlight the different social media capabilities for CKM approach which will enhance customer insight and personalized services. Because of the newness of CKM and social media implementation in Iranian firms, empirical study was not conducted for a better understanding of their business value.

Originality/value

The main innovation of this study is identifying the social media capabilities related to CKM and prioritizing them which allow managers to select the most appropriate social media tools based on these results.

Customer knowledge management practices on a social media platform

The purpose of the paper is to examine how social media can be employed to assist in customer knowledge management in two multinational telecommunication companies operating in Ghana. The study employed case study and netnography as research design. Data was obtained from Twitter and Facebook fan pages of MTN Ghana and Vodafone Ghana. A social media supported Customer Knowledge Management framework was adapted as a conceptual lens. Data was thematically analysed. The findings show that MTN Ghana and Vodafone Ghana have employed social media to manage customer knowledge. The companies engage their customers on Facebook and Twitter to access their knowledge and provide the customers with knowledge about their products and services.