Michelle M. Kazmer, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
kazmer@ci.fsu.edu

Research focus : ICT-based communication and knowledge building

Research areas include : online community, online social worlds, internet studies, CMC (Computer-Mediated Communication), CSCL (Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning), and distributed knowledge processes.

Research projects:

Online social worlds: Students who never meet face-to-face. Examination of social world processes among students in an online learning program that has no required on-campus visits. Builds upon prior work that examined community-building among distance learners, and also tests the twelve-step model of disengaging built during the study of intrinsically transient social worlds (below).

Community-embedded learning. Ongoing work that examines the learning and professional outcomes achieved by online distance learners who remain embedded in their local communities while also attending school and earning a degree.

Research Collaborations: Fostering Future Work Through Successful Endings. An examination of inter-institutional research collaborators and how their experiences near the end of a shared project affect their ability and desire to pursue future collaborations at a distance among themselves and with others.

Understanding Virtual Work Teams: A Hermeneutic Approach. With Gary Burnett (FSU, School of Information Studies) and Kathy Chudoba and Michael Dickey (FSU, Department of Management Information Systems). This project began with a study of a Usenet newsgroup, using a hermeneutics approach to examine how the community norms of the newsgroup were built and maintained through contributed postings. The second stage involves analyzing customer service interactions that took place in textual media (e.g., email, chat), using a hermeneutic approach to examine communication norms and communication breakdowns.

Disengaging from intrinsically transient social worlds: The Case of a Distance Learning Community . Examination of the process through which members of a computer-supported distributed social world disengage from that world when the time of necessary departure is near.

Computer-supported distributed learners . Worked with a team led by Prof. Caroline Haythornthwaite (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) to conduct a longitudinal study of interaction and exchange among distance learners. The study focuses on how students develop and sustain a sense of community when distributed and connected only by computer media.

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