Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Sónia Sousa et al.
3. Elicitation of a set of potential trust effects in the design of LePress
A survey was deployed to better understand the effects and influence of trust people’s online activity
and sharing patterns. Results gather takes in consideration the effects of trust in an online social
context, providing guidelines for effective online community design, development and assessment.
This survey was randomly conducted on 340 individuals (in Portugal and in Cape Verde). Results
showed they are almost equally distributed among gender (53.2% male, 46.8% female). From those
46.5% are higher education students, 41.2% are teachers of various levels of instruction, and 12.3%
have other occupations.
This survey assesses people’s trust behaviors, attitudes and beliefs and their predisposition to share
information. This regards people’s sharing information patterns in distinct natures, (from personal
status to generic music files and other documents) with third parties with whom they maintained
relations of several degrees (from family and friends to total strangers).
So far, the survey results indicated a relevant connection between the predisposition of trust and the
degree of the relation with the third party as this sample's individuals were more willing to share with,
thus trusting, their family and friends than total strangers.
Further, the difference between the willingness to trust family & friends and total strangers was also
higher when asked about sharing their personal status and information than when asked about
sharing generic items.
3.1 Observed roles and perceptions towards trust and sharing attitudes
An important advantage of using blogs in education, according to Du and Wagner (2005) is the ability
fostered by blogs to reinforce individual accountability.
This is accomplished in three ways:
Non-anonymity — personal responsibility of students to progress;
Individualized feedback — embedded in blog capabilities for receiving feedback from teacher and
students;
Benchmarking and self-assessment — possibility for student to compare own work with works of
other students.
Current online social networking services are characterized by the presence of features that allows
individuals to (Weaver and Morrison, 2008):
Construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system;
Articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection; and normally
View and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.
3.1.1 Eliciting potential trust implications
Trust integrates many facets that directly and indirectly influence the relationship process in this
online technological oriented context.
Althought LePress (Tomberg et al, 2010) addresses the perceptions and roles of users, it
accomplishes it in a very open and unrestrictive way, which might potentially induce trust related
concerns within its users, according to the results of our survey.
From a trust perspective, LePress’s non-anonymity can be seen as a feature that fosters people’s
predisposition to engage in a relationship, or construct a public or semi-public profile however, it fails
to afford participant control over what is shared with whom and how.
As such, and in the light improving LePress’s design based on the results of our studies on the
relation between trust and online learning communities, our recommendation is that LePress should in
fact allow its users a fine level of control of what is shared with whom and under what conditions so
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