Well, it’s that time of year again for another HICSS submission. I ran into some financial difficulty last year that prevented me from attending HICSS-46, but I am re-determined to make it back in 2014, should they have me. Below is the tag cloud generated using Wordle, which I think is such a fun feature. In fact, I require my students to submit a tag cloud of their final papers to the discussion board for the class to view. I was a bit surprised by the output of this cloud since I was excepting to see ‘peer’ and ‘support’ to be a much larger font.  In any case, I have also attached the abstract below.
Abstract
In this paper we explore the design and preliminary evaluation of an online peer-to-peer support system for higher education. Our software utilizes existing online social networking (OSN) software to provide students with a multi-dimensional peer-to-peer support structure. More specifically, this research introduces an innovative expansion to online course learning software that enhances communication based on a student’s course activity including course grades and level of technical skill. We measure the impact of our system across introductory college computer programming courses, taken by traditional college students. Initial survey data was positive and while overall levels of agreement fell between pretest and posttest surveys, the majority of students responded favorably to the new system.Â