Xuguang Li, a PhD student at the Information School, has successfully given his upgrade presentation today. Many congratulations.
Li's research project focuses on knowledge construction in an online customer support community, otherwise known as a virtual product user community. This type of virtual community is a producer sponsored customer aggregation existing on the Internet to share usage experience and to collaboratively find technical solutions to problems with specific brand products. It is an interest/knowledge focused virtual community that exists on asynchronous online discussion boards and is tightly connected with the sponsoring organization. In order to explore collaborative knowledge building patterns within such groups, a qualitative content analysis framework is used, drawing on existing analytical models but also patterns emerging from data. A prototypical model of a knowledge construction process in the virtual product user community was presented.
