This research explored whether the components of social support and knowledge-sharing can be shown to correlate with increased preservice teachers' sense of efficacy. The problem statement was to determine if, and to what degree, the social support and knowledge-sharing in an online community, as measured by activity level and count, correlates to…

Workplace changes and the continuing evolution of how we define and practice technical communication require that we consider collaboration in ways we may not have imagined ten, five or even two years ago. The unexpected COVID-19 pandemic pushed our world and collaboration into additional and unanticipated directions. Since one of our…

Growing out of research in Technical Communication, Composition Studies, and Writing Program Administration, the articles in this dissertation explicitly seek to address changes in the practices and products of writing and writing studies wrought by the so-called "digital revolution" in communication technology, which has been ongoing in…

Company-hosted online user communities are increasingly popular as firms continue to search for ways to provide their customers with high quality and reliable support in a low cost and scalable way. Yet, empirical understanding of motivations for knowledge sharing in this type of online communities is lacking, especially with regard to an…

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of an online workspace component of a community in the work of a community of practice. Much has been studied revealing the importance of communities of practice to organizations, project success, and knowledge management and some of these same successes hold true for virtual communities of…

Location-based services have been identified as a promising communication paradigm in highly mobile and dynamic vehicular networks. However, existing mobile ad hoc networking cannot be directly applied to vehicular networking due to differences in traffic conditions, mobility models and network topologies. On the other hand, hybrid architectures…

Initiatives within organizations that promote sharing of knowledge may be hampered by generational differences. Research on relationships between generations and technology-based knowledge sharing campaigns provides little managerial guidance for practitioners. The purpose of this ethnographic study was to identify the factors that influence the…

The concept of communities of practice (CoP) was first introduced by Lave and Wenger in their short monograph, "Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation." Since then, the concept has become immensely popular in a variety of disciplines. This dissertation traces the concept of CoP back to its inception and early transformation at the…

This dissertation examines, from a managerial interpretive perspective, how information systems contribute to firms' specific competitive actions and responses, and the resultant impacts upon firm performance. The findings from this research suggest that the answer may well lie within the role of information systems in firms' competitive dynamics…

On one Marine Corps base, a minimum of 5% of adult enlisted Marines per year lack certain competencies and seek admittance into a high school competency remediation program. The lack of these competencies impedes qualification for many military occupational specialties, the ability to convert from an enlisted Marine to a Warrant Officer, or…

Information Technology has brought significant benefits to organizations by allowing greater information sharing within and across firm boundaries leading to performance improvements. Emerging technologies such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web2.0 have transformed the volume and process of information sharing. However, a comprehensive…