Her research focuses on social processes in online social worlds, especially online worlds that are designed to be temporary. Her research has examined the social world disengaging processes of distance learners and academic researchers, as well as community-embedded online learning. She is especially interested in how knowledge is shared among people who have left a social world, and in how individuals' local environment shapes their online experiences. She works with an interdisciplinary research team that uses a hermeneutics approach for studying virtual communities. She has worked with online learners as a teacher and researcher since 1997, in the LEEP programme at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and at Florida State. Her research has been published in journals such as Library Quarterly, Library and Information Science Research, and New Media and Society.