Abstract A recent draft manuscript suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school (Karpinski, 2009). The report quickly became a media sensation and was picked up by hundreds of news outlets in a matter of days. However, the results were based on correlational data in a draft manuscript that had not been published, or even considered for publication. This paper attempts to replicate the results reported in the press release using three data sets: one with a large sample of undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, another with a nationally representative cross sectional sample of American 14- to 22-year-olds, as well as a longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14-23. In none of the samples do we find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades. Indeed, if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades. We also examined how changes in academic performance in the nationally representative sample related to Facebook use and found that Facebook users were no different from non-users.

Threshold Magazine Spring 2009 This issue of Threshold: Exploring the Future of Education features articles focused on learning in a participatory culture, produced in partnership with MIT Project New Media Literacies.

How Many Chores Does It All Add May 5, 2009 · Comments milking cows In the morning, I open up Google Reader and start by checking out who's talking about me, my company, PodCamp, and a few other choice terms. I read a few blogs (around 700). I check on some other searches for clients that I've loaded into my reader. When I'm done, I check Facebook to see who's looking for a friend request (because they have a limit on friends, I have to be picky). I see who's sent me Facebook mail (normally junk inviting me to someone's dumb marketing webinar). I try to remember to check the birthdays.

A theme framework is a theme that is designed to be a flexible foundation that can serve as a parent theme for building child themes. The use of WordPress theme frameworks may ease theme development by reducing the volume of work which may be needed in creating a backbone for your theme (usually by using PHP and WordPress Template Tags). Theme frameworks also make theme development more accessible, removing the need for programming knowledge. I listed here the best Wordpress theme frameworks available as well as several child themes and related articles to help get Your foot with Wordpress theme developing.

Top 10 Tips for Twitter … and Life by Guest Poster on January 22, 2009 in Twitter for Beginners In this post Crystal N Woods (follow her at @crystalsquest) shares some great tips for those starting out in Twitter. twitter-tips.png The buzz this year is all about Twitter, the 'microblog' service. Both the web and twitter are full of pleas from people who say they don't 'get it'. In a nutshell, the point of twitter is to post very short updates - no more than 140 characters. It's a bit like a txt msg for the web, on 'what you're doing now'. These tweets can be links to cool sites you've found, conversations with other twitter users, questions you want a quick answer for, what you're having for dinner or even haiku poetry. The main difference between twitter and txt is: when you send it out it goes out to everyone who's opted to follow you. On the receiving end, you're getting these updates from everyone you've chosen to follow. This constant flow of short messages to and from is called the 'twitter stream'. It can be a bit overwhelming at first. Just like modern life. In fact, it occurred to me that the people who 'get it' and rave about it the most are the very same people who have achieved vast levels of success in this information age. So, here's my take on the top 10 success tips for twitter… and Life!

Using Twitter… 'The Smart Way' by Guest Poster on December 9, 2008 in Twitter Tools, Twitter for Beginners Today Mark Ramskill (@ramskill) from SubHub, takes a look at some of the steps that new Twitter users can go through to get going. Twitter, having been quickly adopted initially by key influencers, has grown into a mass-market communication tool, with millions of users. If you're publishing content, undertaking online marketing, and looking to keep up with the latest trends in anything web related then Twitter should be featuring highly as a 'weapon of choice'. In this article I'll be assuming you are new to Twitter, and that rather than wanting to use Twitter as a way of simply keeping up with friends, you want to use it as a tool for valuable engagement and maximum effect, avoiding the white noise that Twitter can also create if used incorrectly. I call this 'Using Twitter, the Smart Way'.

10 Easy Steps for Twitter Beginners by Darren Rowse on November 16, 2008 in Twitter for Beginners In this guest post Aira Bongco (@airabongco) shares 10 tips for Beginners who are just getting into Twitter. So you just signed up for Twitter. You make your first tweet and you realize you don't have any followers. "What a dumb idea!" You say. "Who the hell would be interested in what I'm doing anyway?" Don't worry. You're normal. That is a sign that you are a Twitter beginner. A lot of us Twitter users (or addicts) went through the same questioning routine. And look at us now. We're geeks who are on Twitter all day and night and we can't stop tweeting. So you want to be like us? It's not that hard really. Just follow these simple steps.

How to Hack Together a Twitter Client Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the WorldGuy Kawasaki of How to Change the World | May 4th, 2009 - 03:57 PM (89) found this useful. Do you? Yes NNW.jpg Sometimes you can make do with what's available. Take, for example, Twitter clients. Until someone creates my fantasy Twitter client, I am using an application that doesn't have "Tw" anywhere in its name or heritage. It's called NetNewsWire. This is bizarre because NetNewsWire is a RSS reader. Its purpose is to aggregate news feeds from websites and blogs. (Ironically, my company, Alltop, is in the business of making RSS readers unnecessary, but that's another story.) Using NetNewsWire for Twitter is like using a Toyota Prius as a taxi cab: it makes sense because of the Prius's great mileage, but I doubt that Toyota planned it this way or optimized Prius for this purpose.

10 Essential Plugins Every Modern Wordpress Site Should Have Essential Wordpress Plugins One of the many benefits to WordPress, one of the most popular blogging platform and Content Management System (CMS), is that it is open source software with a very large and dedicated community. There are so many great developers working to make WordPress the best that it can be, that there are thousands of free plugins available to enhance the platform's default functionality.

To create a social networking site, you can either register a free account with a ahird party social networks provider or install open source software on your server and be your own administrator. There are pros and cons in these two methods. The first method allows you to handle your social networks without any technical knowledge, but you risk losing all your data when the third party site close down. The latter requires you to have certain technical knowledge, but you get full control over every single detail in your site. With the release of BuddyPress, there is now a third way that is both easy to handle and allows you to have full control: turn your WordPress site into a social networking site. BuddyPress is not a standalone social networking software. It is in fact a set of WordPress plugins and themes that enables the users to add social networking modules to their sites. You can either use it as an addon service to your existing blog, or convert your domain to a full fledge social networking site.

15 Impressive and Beautiful Uses of WordPress WordPress is no longer just used to power blogs. It has become the CMS of choice for many web designers. It's always interesting to see how it's flexibility provides web designers with the freedom to design sites with no limitations. Here are 15 beautiful web sites all powered by WordPress.

wealth of networks online as a wiki Table of Contents From Yochai Benkler - Wealth of Networks Jump to: navigation, search The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler * 1. Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge 1 * Part One. The Networked Information Economy 29 o 2. Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation 35 o 3. Peer Production and Sharing 59 o 4. The Economics of Social Production 91 * Part Two. The Political Economy of Property and Commons 129 o 5. Individual Freedom: Autonomy, Information, and Law 133 o 6. Political Freedom Part 1: The Trouble with Mass Media 176 o 7. Political Freedom Part 2: Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere 212 o 8. Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical 273 o 9. Justice and Development 301 o 10. Social Ties: Networking Together 356 * Part Three. Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation 379 o 11. The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment 383 o 12. Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy 460 * Notes 475 * Front Matter * Epigraph: John Stuart Mill, On Liberty * Acknowledgments * Library of Congress data

Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. About Yochai Benkler Yochai Benkler has been called "the leading intellectual of the information age." He proposes that volunteer-based projects such as Wikipedia and Linux are the next stage of human organization…

Yochai Benkler's wealth of nations book online Next Chapter: Part I: The Networked Information Economy » read paragraph Chapter 1: Introduction: A Moment of Opportunity and Challenge 1 Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be; who decides these questions; and how we, as societies and polities, come to understand what can and ought to be done. For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions. In the past decade and a half, we have begun to see a radical change in the organization of information production. Enabled by technological change, we are beginning to see a series of economic, social, and cultural adaptations that make possible a radical transformation of how we make the information environment we occupy as autonomous individuals, citizens, and members of cultural and social groups. It seems passé today to speak of "the Internet revolution." In some academic circles, it is positively naïve. But it should not be. The change brought about by the networked information environment is deep. It is structural. It goes to the very foundations of how liberal markets and liberal democracies have coevolved for almost two centuries.

Create a video site in seconds Build a video blog, the next YouTube or just a private place to share videos.

Daily Awesome Tips, Tricks, Cheats And Review!! Twitter Toolbox: 70+ Awesome Twitter Apps, Mash-Ups, Plugins And Services with 2 comments Twitter is hot and making an impact on social networking on the web. With the recent Twitter race between Ashton Kutcher and CNN as well as Tweetie just released for the Mac, Twitter is becoming more and more significant in the social networking and social media world. It is no wonder Twitter is a great platform for many awesome extensions to develop. In this post, we will show you to 70+ Twitter apps, add-ons, services, mashups and plugins to enhance your Twitter experience. Please help us spread this post on Twitter if you liked this article!! All of the Twitter apps listed below are free unless otherwise stated:

For the Spring 2009 Digital Ethnography course led by Michael Wesch. This is a compilation of trailers created by students for their Spring 2009 projects. For more information about our project, visit our research hub: http://www.netvibes.com/wesch There you will find links to student blogs, our wiki, our diigo links, notes, and other materials.

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