With the development of internet technology, professional virtual community (PVC) is becoming the valuable external knowledge source for graduate students. Students search information and knowledge in specific domain, share research experiences and weave their social network in these professional virtual communities (PVCs). How to use PVC to increase graduate students’ creativity should be an important researching issue. Although students’ online behaviors have got researchers’ attention, students’ PVC behaviors and their impacts on creativity keeps less comprehensively understood. The empirically analysis of totally 930 graduate students in this study turns out that graduate students’ PVC behaviors include 17 categories which then are clustered into three dimensions: Knowledge & Networking Behavior, Behave Manner and Interactivity. To test their impacts on graduate students’ creativity, the regression results demonstrate that after controlling students’ intrinsic motivation and creative self-efficacy, Knowledge & Network Behavior and Behavior Manner both significantly predict students’ creativity. However Interactivity does not affect students’ creativity. Implications and future research are discussed.
Internet is originally developed as a means by which dispersed academic researchers could collaborate and communicate outcomes (Naughton, 1999). Internet has been an easiest, fastest, and cheapest ways of accessing necessary information (Cloud, 1989), and has become an important knowledge source (Jeffres et al., 2012 and Lou et al., 2010). It is becoming an important information or knowledge source and a widely used communication platform for college students. With the development of internet technology, virtual interactions among professional persons are being increased quickly and which leads to the emergence of virtual networked knowledge society (De Moor & Weigand, 2007). One special phenomenon is the birth of professional virtual communities (PVCs). People use PVCs to improve their expertise capabilities, absorb advanced insights, and resolve problems (Lin, Hung, & Chen, 2009). PVCs are dramatically changing students’ learning and knowledge environment and becoming a second classroom for graduate students. PVCs assist students in course learning and doing research. Previous studies found students’ PVCs behaviors include searching information (Kirkwood, 2008 and Ruzgar, 2005), sharing knowledge (Bock and Kim, 2002 and Chen, 2007) and discussion (Wachter, Gupta, & Quaddus, 2000). Related studies have showen that receivers can integrate new knowledge gained from internet into their existing knowledge (Wijnhoven, 1998). PVCs play as a kind of external knowledge source and cannot be neglected in education researching field.
Improving creativity is especially important for graduate students’ education. In China, there are two kinds of education program for graduate students. One is two-year program, which aims to improve students’ ability to apply expertise skills or capabilities. The other is three-year program, which aims to improve student’s academic research ability and help students prepare well for the potential Ph.D. degree studying. The graduate students in this study come from the latter, namely three-year program. These students are required to do creative dissertations. We have noticed that lots of graduate students join in PVCs in their learning and researching processes. PVCs have become a commonly used external knowledge source and platform to weave personal network. Graduate students’ PVC behaviors might influence their creativity. However, update the categories of graduate students’ PVC behaviors keep less comprehensively understood. Except that related studies on students’ online behaviors, which are based on calculating the number of messages students post or the time they stay on the Internet (Yukelturk, 2010). We also learn fewer about what kind of PVC behavior might help graduate students’ creativity, except few related studies about online behaviors and student academic work, such as information retrieval behaviors (Biddix et al., 2011 and Currie et al., 2010).
Hence, the aim of this study is to figure out graduate students’ PVC behaviors and their impact on creativity. In this study we will use method of implicit theories to explore students’ PVF behaviors. Implicit theory believes that some constructions are resided in the minds of exporters as well as laypersons. These constructions need to be discovered rather than invented because they already exist, in people’s heads in some forms (Sternberg, 1985). Scholars have used implicit theory to study intelligence, creativity, and wisdom. By simply asking people what they are, scholars can define some vague concepts. In this study, we use this method because we believe that graduate students are qualified to reflect their PVC behaviors, they will offer real information about their real PVC behaviors in detail. Based on this approach, it is possible to get what happened in the students’ real behavior in the virtual world. Additionally, this study also exam whether these PVC behaviors will improve graduate students’ creativity in order to give students some suggestions.
The rest of this paper will be organized as follows. Part 2 is the literature review. Then will be the empirical study. In study one, 86 graduate students participated in the investigation to collect the detail creative PVC behaviors of graduate students. In study two, 611 respondents were investigated. The data was used to analyze the dimensions of students’ creative PVC behaviors. Study three used linear regression model to examine the correlation between PVC behaviors, intrinsic motivation, creative self-efficacy and creativity. The last part is the discussion, implications and further research is suggested.
