(Blacksburg, Va., September 20, 2000) -- Researchers at Virginia Tech's Center for Human-Computer Interaction http://www.hci.vt.edu have won a two-year, $458,165 grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the use and social impacts of the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV - http://www.bev.net), one of the prominent American community networking projects of the 1990s. The principal investigators for the project are John M. Carroll and Mary Beth Rosson; professors of computer science. Carroll is also the center director. Carroll and Rosson's "learning in a networked community" (LiNC - http://linc.cs.vt.edu/) project has collaborated on several previous BEV projects, including the NSF-sponsored BEV HistoryBase, Nostalgia - a joint project with BEV seniors, the NSF-sponsored Virtual School - a joint project with Montgomery County Public Schools, and the Hitachi Foundation-sponsored MOOsburg http://moosburg.cs.vt.edu/.
The new project, titled "Interdisciplinary Views of the Blacksburg Electronic Village," includes faculty investigators from Stanford University, the University of Illinois, the Open University in the United Kingdom, Blacksburg Electronic Village, and Carnegie Mellon University, as well as Virginia Tech. The project will employ several methods, including community surveys, detailed interviews, session logging, a participatory evaluation forum, and a variety of psychological scales. It addresses a such key issues about communities and community networks as:
- Who participates in community networks?
- What are the networks used for?
- How are local business activities and opportunities changed, and how direct a cause is the network?
- In what ways does access to local government information, or to public decision-making change?
- What are the consequences for community life, and for community health and well-being?
- How is participation in community life greater or more diverse?
- Do people feel safer in a community networking context than in the general Internet context?
- Do they feel their personal data is safer?
- Can a community network enhance self-perceptions of collective self-efficacy in the community?
- Has the social capital of the Blacksburg community increased as a consequence of the BEV?
- And what are the causes and effects of unequal participation throughout the community?
Researchers on the project are: Albert Bandura, the David Starr Jordan Professor of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University; Ann Peterson Bishop, assistant professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois; Marilyn Dunckley, lecturer in computing at the Open University in the United Kingdom; Daniel R. Dunlap, research associate in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Ph.D. candidate in Science and Technology Studies at Virginia Tech; Philip L. Isenhour, research associate in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction; Andrea L. Kavanaugh, director of research for the Blacksburg Electronic Village; Robert Kraut, professor of social psychology and human computer interaction at Carnegie Mellon University; and Dennis C. Neale, research associate in the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Ph.D. candidate in industrial and systems engineering at Virginia Tech.
Contact for more information:
John M. Carroll
email: carroll@cs.vt.edu;
Phone: 540-231-8453;
FAX: 540-231-6075
PR CONTACT: Susan Trulove
Phone: 540-231-5646
STrulove@vt.edu