Greater interest in self-directed professions, like entrepreneurship, have led to a growth in informal workplace communities and social technologies that support new ways of working. However, we have little understanding of how these socio-technical environments support opportunities for professional skill development. The goal of this dissertation is to understand how social technologies are facilitating opportunities for apprentice-like instruction in co-located and distributed informal entrepreneurial communities. I first take a primarily qualitative approach involving interviews and participant observations to understand how apprenticeship is instantiated in informal entrepreneurial communities, like in makerspaces and crowdfunding, without dedicated formal guidance. I then apply these insights to develop and evaluate a tool, IntroAssist, that helps novice entrepreneurs perform introductory help-seeking in these communities. Practically, this work identifies design implications and presents a tool that highlights how social technologies can be developed to better support opportunities for apprenticeship. The findings also contribute an emergent theoretical understanding of how social technologies support new forms of apprenticeship in distributed informal workplace contexts.

Last modified

• 01/25/2019

Creator

• Julie Hui

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2BF37

Subject

• Mechanical Engineering

Keyword

• Online communities
• Social computing
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Makerspaces
• Crowdfunding
• Online learning

Date created

• 2017-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright