II-NEW: Exploration of Social Trust in Mobile Educational Environments

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Advanced wireless technologies allow users to communicate anytime and anywhere and wireless communities are becoming ubiquitous with the proliferation of various handheld mobile devices. These communities are very different from traditional Internet-based online communities in which people are connected with one another but neither know each other in person nor necessarily care where they are at any specific moment. In contrast, in wireless communities, people are much more closely bound to each other through a sense of sharing a common physical and/or social context. This planning grant explores small 'nomadic' and 'settled'- like wireless communities in educational environments and the social trust aspects when using educational services within these mobile learning communities (MLC). The PIs develop a limited mobile wireless testbed, with hybrid wireless peer-to-peer, and infrastructure-based connectivity, and a small set of trust-ensuring educational services, made available in the form of a MLC-toolkit to students in a selected class. The PIs validate the MLC- toolkit in a small MLC group and explore the social trust depending on the type of class / users activity, active participation of students, and mobility of students (nomadic versus settled). The PIs also explore, where the assurance of social trust comes from, e.g., from friends and their various types of ties (strong versus weak ties), and/or from the underlying software and hardware infrastructure. The impact is in developing, and deploying the MLC-toolkit, and understanding social trust metrics and their relations to users and underlying infrastructures.