Contents contributed and discussions participated by Eric Calvert
How Online Companies Get You to Share More and Spend More | Magazine - 0 views
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Much of Facebook’s genius revolves around the Wall: a public space that we curate but that other people can add to. Within the universe of the site, where everyone is a “friend,” you feel a special compulsion to respond to Wall posts—to comment on others’ posts to yours and to reciprocate by writing on theirs. We want our Walls to reflect ourselves. It’s analogous to the way we curate our belongings, which itself is a window into our personalities. (The psychologist Sam Gosling has shown you can learn more about people from their possessions than from spending time with them. Walls are basically the same—a storefront window to the self.) Users want to display a self that is somewhere between their real self and how they would like to be perceived, which creates a substantial motivation for constant monitoring and upkeep of the Wall.
Beyond Information: Developing the Relationship betweehn the Individual and the Group i... - 0 views
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Potentially good stuff for next week. (Is this article too technical to be a reading for the class?) Intresting tidbits: getting negative feedback in an online community is better than getting no feedback in terms of maintaining involvement. People who introduce themselves in postings are more likely to get responses. "Endorsements" are reinforcing. (THus the like button?) People participate longer if they received replies containing first-person plural pronouns (e.g. "we" vs. "you.") Communities that police people mistreating newcomers are more successful. Most successful communities have facilitators (or people who take on a facilitative role.)
Modeling Social Media in Groups, Communities, and Networks - 0 views
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This article views social networking as practiced distinctly in groups, communities, and networks. Drawing from experience coordinating a teachers’ community of practice for the past decade, the evolution of what was initially a group into a community of practice is illustrated, as well as how social media enables one CoP to interact with others to become part of a distributed learning network. Participants in the networked communities continually leverage each other’s professional development, and what is modeled and practiced in transactions there is applied later in their teaching practices. Recidivism is a problem in technology training for education. Teachers can be shown how to use social media, but unless they use it themselves they are unlikely to change their practices. There is evidence that teachers trained in programs where their instructors used social media (modeled it) are more comfortable with technology than if their instructors did not themselves use these tools. This article suggests how teachers can interact with numerous communities of practice and distributed learning networks where other participants are modeling to and learning from one another optimal ways of using social media in teaching. This strongly suggests that teachers must be trained not only in the use of social media, but through its use.
open thinking » youth - 1 views
Social Media: The Media We Love to Hate | Psychology Today - 0 views
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What is the media we love to hate? Right now, it's social media.
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Social Media is an easy target
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When people process information that challenges their view of the world, many lose the ability to think critically. They seek cognitive consonance and comfort.
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Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities (2004) - 0 views
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ABSTRACT : Under-contribution is a problem for many online communities. Social psychology theories of social loafing and goal-setting can provide mid-level design principles to address this problem. We tested the design principles in two field experiments. In one, members of an online movie recommender community were reminded of the uniqueness of their contributions and the benefits that follow from them. In the second, they were given a range of individual or group goals for contribution. As predicted by theory, individuals contributed when they were reminded of their uniqueness and when they were given specific and challenging goals, but other predictions were not borne out. The paper ends with suggestions and challenges for mining social science theories as well as implications for design.
Behavior Chain for Online Participation: How Successful Web Services Structure Persuasion - 0 views
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Paper by B.J. Fogg and Dean Eckles (2007). Abstract: The success of many online services today depends on the company's ability to persuade users to take specific actions, such as registering or inviting friends. We examined over 50 popular Web services of this kind to understand the influence processes and strategies used. We found that successful online services share a pattern of target behaviors that can be viewed as part of an overall framework. We call this framework the "Behavior Chain for Online Participation." This paper briefly presents the general idea of a behavior chain and applies it to understanding persuasion patterns found online. We then illustrate the Behavior Chain for Online Participation by applying it to the Web service LinkedIn and other popular services. Future research may identify behavior chains in other domains and develop new research methods for validating behavior chains
Student Communication Preferences in a Technology-Enhanced Learning Environment - 2 views
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The rush to implement eLearning has perhaps found full expression in the failure of Britain's ambitious online university UKeU, which gained only 900 of its target 5,600 students and was officially wound up in 2004, four years (and £50 million] after it was launched. The failure of UKeU has been blamed on its development being technology-led rather than being centred on pedagogical goals and ideals (Education and Skills Committee, 2005).
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Adoption of eLearning in higher education typically begins with an administrative decision to back a specific Virtual Learning Envirnment (VLE) platform. Teachers are then encouraged to use the platform, usually without a fundamental change to course structure. The VLE is then used as an electronic version of some aspects of the existing course -- for example, using the internet as a repository for lecture handouts. This makes the VLE a convenient resource, but does not fundamentally alter methods of teaching and learning (Murphy 2003).
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Do students prefer some communication media over others in different situations? If they do the communication method chosen for group project work with a peer may be different from the one selected for time-sensitive communication with an instructor. The answers to these questions have an important impact on instructors designing and leaching classes for a dual audience (i.e., traditional and remote). It also impacts the types of group projects that are assigned and the modes of communication that are supported to service students in these classes.
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ABSTRACT Universities must be capable of effectively teaching students who attend class in the traditional sense as well as those who learn from distant locations via technology. This places new challenges on instructors who design courses to fit within this hybrid environment. One such challenge is determining which communication media to support and emphasize. A wide variety of communication options are available and student preferences may differ based upon who they are communicating with and the context of the communication. This paper describes an empirical research project to address this question. A survey was administered to 596 undergraduate business students. The results of this project indicate that a student's media preference varies depending upon the characteristics of the medium, the context of the message, and the target of the communication. These results have useful implications to instructors involved in distance education as well as those using traditional course delivery methods.
6 Technologies That Will Shape Education -- THE Journal - 2 views
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This year's report cited five challenges that the authors identified as "critical." They include: Inadequate digital media literacy training for teachers; Out of date learning materials and teaching practices; Lack of agreement on how education should evolve, despite widespread agreement that change is needed; A failure of education institutions to adapt to informal education, online education, and home-based learning; and Lack of support for or acknowledgement of forms of learning that usually occur outside the classroom. On this last point, the report said: "Beyond the classroom walls, students can take advantage of online resources, explore ideas and practice skills using games and other programs they may have on systems at home, and interact with their extensive--and constantly available--social networks. Within the classroom, learning that incorporates real life experiences like these is not occurring enough and is too often undervalued when it does take place. This challenge is an important one in K-12 schools, because it results in a lack of engagement in learning on the part of students who are seeking some connection between their world, their own lives, and their experience in school."
Tech Tips For Teachers: Free, Easy and Useful Creation Tools - The Learning Network Blo... - 1 views
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You might be looking for ways to refresh or update your bag of tricks.
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Or perhaps you’re just curious to find out how technology tools can enhance your teaching and your students’ experience and engagement in your courses.
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Ryan Goble, who often coaches teachers in what he calls the “mindful” use of technology, has written today’s guest post on user-friendly tools that enable the creation of student projects.
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Announcing Zipcast - changing the way the world conducts web meetings | SlideShare Blog - 0 views
Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities: - 0 views
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Using Social Psychology to Motivate Contributions to Online Communities
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Under-contribution is a problem for many online communities. Social psychology theories of social loafing and goal-setting can lead to mid-level design goals to address this problem. We tested design principles derived from these theories in four field experiments involving members of an online movie recommender community. In each of the experiments participated were given different explanations for the value of their contributions. As predicted by theory, individuals contributed when they were reminded of their uniqueness and when they were given specific and challenging goals. However, other predictions were disconfirmed.
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Despite the vibrancy of online communities, large numbers of them fail. In many online groups, participation drops to zero. Butler (1999) found that 50% of social, hobby, and work mailing lists had no traffic over a period of four months. On the popular peer-to-peer music sharing service, Gnutella, 10% of users provide 87% of all the music (Adar & Huberman, 2000). In open-source development communities, 4% of members account for 50% of answers on a user-to-user help site (Lakhani & Hippel, 2003), and 4% of developers contribute 88% of new code and 66% of code fixes (Mockus, Fielding, & Andersen, 2002).
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The Answer Sheet - How to help African-American males in school: Treat them like gifted... - 0 views
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I wanted to cry when I read about the recent widely publicized report from the Council of Great City Schools about the underachievement of African-American males in our schools. Its findings bear repeating: African-American boys drop out at nearly twice the rate of white boys; their SAT scores are on average 104 points lower; and black men represented just 5 percent of college students in 2008.
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Driven by the intense focus on accountability, schools and teachers used standardized test scores to help identify and address student weaknesses. Over time, these deficits began to define far too many students so that all we saw were their deficits – particularly for African-American males. As a result, we began losing sight of these young boys’ gifts and, as a consequence, stifled their talents.
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We need to shift from remediation focused on weaknesses to mediation that develops strengths.
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