Skip to main content

Home/ Twitterteachers/ Group items tagged studies

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Maggie Verster

The effect of Twitter on college student engagement and grades - 0 views

  •  
    "Despite the widespread use of social media by students and its increased use by instructors, very little empirical evidence is available concerning the impact of social media use on student learning and engagement. This paper describes our semester-long experimental study to determine if using Twitter - the microblogging and social networking platform most amenable to ongoing, public dialogue - for educationally relevant purposes can impact college student engagement and grades. A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities. This study provides experimental evidence that Twitter can be used as an educational tool to help engage students and to mobilize faculty into a more active and participatory role."
Ed Webb

Study Shows Students Are Addicted to Social Media | News | Communications of the ACM - 0 views

  • most college students are not just unwilling, but functionally unable to be without their media links to the world. "I clearly am addicted and the dependency is sickening," says one person in the study. "I feel like most people these days are in a similar situation, for between having a Blackberry, a laptop, a television, and an iPod, people have become unable to shed their media skin."
  • what they wrote at length about was how they hated losing their personal connections. Going without media meant, in their world, going without their friends and family
  • they couldn't connect with friends who lived close by, much less those far away
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • "Texting and IM-ing my friends gives me a constant feeling of comfort," wrote one student. "When I did not have those two luxuries, I felt quite alone and secluded from my life. Although I go to a school with thousands of students, the fact that I was not able to communicate with anyone via technology was almost unbearable."
  • students' lives are wired together in such ways that opting out of that communication pattern would be tantamount to renouncing a social life
  • "Students expressed tremendous anxiety about being cut-off from information,"
  • How did they get the information? In a disaggregated way, and not typically from the news outlet that broke or committed resources to a story.
  • the young adults in this study appeared to be generally oblivious to branded news and information
  • an undifferentiated wave to them via social media
  • 43.3 percent of the students reported that they had a "smart phone"
  • Quotes
Ed Webb

Our Digitally Undying Memories - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 0 views

  • as Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues convincingly in his book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age (Princeton University Press, 2009), the costs of such powerful collective memory are often higher than we assume.
  • "Total recall" renders context, time, and distance irrelevant. Something that happened 40 years ago—whether youthful or scholarly indiscretion—still matters and can come back to harm us as if it had happened yesterday.
  • an important "third wave" of work about the digital environment. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, we saw books like Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital (Knopf, 1995) and Howard Rhein-gold's The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier (Addison-Wesley, 1993) and Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution (Perseus, 2002), which idealistically described the transformative powers of digital networks. Then we saw shallow blowback, exemplified by Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason (Pantheon, 2008).
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • For most of human history, forgetting was the default and remembering the challenge.
  • Chants, songs, monasteries, books, libraries, and even universities were established primarily to overcome our propensity to forget over time. The physical and economic limitations of all of those technologies and institutions served us well. Each acted not just as memory aids but also as filters or editors. They helped us remember much by helping us discard even more.
    • Ed Webb
       
      Excellent point, well made.
  • Just because we have the vessels, we fill them.
  • Even 10 years ago, we did not consider that words written for a tiny audience could reach beyond, perhaps to someone unforgiving, uninitiated in a community, or just plain unkind.
  • Remembering to forget, as Elvis argued, is also essential to getting over heartbreak. And, as Jorge Luis Borges wrote in his 1942 (yep, I Googled it to find the date) story "Funes el memorioso," it is just as important to the act of thinking. Funes, the young man in the story afflicted with an inability to forget anything, can't make sense of it. He can't think abstractly. He can't judge facts by relative weight or seriousness. He is lost in the details. Painfully, Funes cannot rest.
  • Our use of the proliferating data and rudimentary filters in our lives renders us incapable of judging, discriminating, or engaging in deductive reasoning. And inductive reasoning, which one could argue is entering a golden age with the rise of huge databases and the processing power needed to detect patterns and anomalies, is beyond the reach of lay users of the grand collective database called the Internet.
  • the default habits of our species: to record, retain, and release as much information as possible
  • Perhaps we just have to learn to manage wisely how we digest, discuss, and publicly assess the huge archive we are building. We must engender cultural habits that ensure perspective, calm deliberation, and wisdom. That's hard work.
  • we choose the nature of technologies. They don't choose us. We just happen to choose unwisely with some frequency
  • surveillance as the chief function of electronic government
  • critical information studies
  • Siva Vaidhyanathan is an associate professor of media studies and law at the University of Virginia. His next book, The Googlization of Everything, is forthcoming from the University of California Press.
  • Nietzsche's _On the Use and Disadvantage of History for Life_
  • Google compresses, if not eliminates, temporal context. This is likely only to exacerbate the existing problem in politics of taking one's statements out of context. A politician whose views on a subject have evolved quite logically over decades in light of changing knowledge and/or circumstances is held up in attack ads as a flip-flopper because consecutive Google entries have him/her saying two opposite things about the same subject -- and never mind that between the two statements, the Berlin Wall may have fallen or the economy crashed harder than at any other time since 1929.
Ed Webb

Is the internet making teens nicer? - Yahoo! News - 2 views

  • We typically assume that the internet is turning kids into narcissistic, vicious cyber-bullies, but a growing body of research indicates that the opposite is true. New research suggests that spending time emailing, texting, and Facebook-ing might actually help both adults and kids become better friends and people
  • the more time college students spent on the internet, the more empathetic they were both online and off
  • Forty-five percent of 3,777 teens surveyed reported being bullied, but fewer than 20 percent of those said it had occurred online or via text messaging or phone. Almost 40 percent said it had happened in person. And two-thirds of those bullied online said they didn't even find the abuse upsetting.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • "Have our brains become so desensitized by a 24/7, all-you-can-eat diet of lurid flickering images that we've lost all perspective on appropriateness and compassion?" they asked. A 2007 study of 18 to 23-year-olds found they were less able to identify expressions of emotion after playing violent video games. And, while Dr. Rosen's study found that can help people relate better, it also found that excessive social networking makes some teens more prone to aggression, mania, anxiety, and depression.
Ed Webb

Most Faculty Don't Use Twitter, Study Reveals -- Campus Technology - 0 views

  • 30.7 percent of respondents reported that they do, in fact, use Twitter in one way or another--a percentage that's fairly high compared with the percentage of the general adult American population that uses Twitter (which is projected to be in the neighborhood of 10 percent to 11 percent by 2010).
    • Ed Webb
       
      This is actually the headline, surely? Three times as many US faculty use Twitter as the mean of the adult population.
Maggie Verster

Twitter Increases Student Engagement [STUDY] - 2 views

  •  
    I told you sooo :-)
Maggie Verster

Ed/ITLib Digital Library → IJEL 9:1 Table of Contents - 1 views

  •  
    -Mentoring Professors: A Model for Developing Quality Online Instructors and Courses in Higher Education -Web-Based vs. Paper-Based Homework to Evaluate Students' Performance in Introductory Physics Courses and Students' Perceptions: Two Years Experience -E-Learning in Undergraduate Humanities Classes: Unpacking the Variables -Student Participation Patterns in Online Discussion: Incorporating Constructivist Discussion into Online Courses -Elements of Problem-Based Learning: Suggestions for Implementation in the Asynchronous Environment -Creating an Innovative Learning Organization -Assessment in Online Programs: Use in Strategic Planning for Faculty/Adjunct Development and Course Instruction to Improve Faculty and Student Engagement
Ed Webb

Toughest college test: No cell phone, no Facebook | StarTribune.com - 1 views

  • This story really sums up what it is to be a student right now in this century. I am actually a student of Professor LaMarre's and in this very class. My generation really does not know what it is like to be outside of this instant communication with friends and other people which has really deteriorated the true relationships people used to and were forced to build with one another. The ability to escape from everyone is impossible. I went to Mexico for 3 weeks over winter break to study and was not able to escape my parents need for me to be in contact through email or text... interesting to think about what it has done to parent/child relationships and especially our interpersonal relationships with significant others.
  • I moved to U.S. 2 decades ago. I came from a 3rd world country (it was at that time). But I had learned how to use the abacus, and do simple mulitiplication in my head. I'm sorry to say this but Americans are FAR behind on REAL education. While you guys play party games in schools and pass that as education. It is quite pathetic what America pass as an education in the public system. By the time I had caught up with English in my 2nd year in American school, I had realized how stupid American pubilc schools are and how inept they are. By 1st and 2nd grade I was memorizing simple mulitplication and division in my third world country. In U.S. kids don't even know what division is until 3rd grade. We didn't have Stadiums, auditoriums, computer labs, track and field track, swimming pool. We didn't even have central heat or air! We got our excercise out on a dirt field with some swings, bats and balls. What's the next generation going to do for a learning experience? "Walking to the mailbox" ??? Because in a few decades, America will be so fat and obese that it will be a revelation to all the fat americans, what it was like to actually walk to the mailbox.
  •  
    Reader comments enlightening.
Fabian Aguilar

The powerful and mysterious brain circuitry that makes us love Google, Twitter, and tex... - 0 views

  • Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves.
  • "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner."
  • In 1954, psychologist James Olds and his team were working in a laboratory at McGill University, studying how rats learned.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • He eventually discovered that if the probe was put in the brain's lateral hypothalamus and the rats were allowed to press a lever and stimulate their own electrodes, they would press until they collapsed.
  • For humans, this desire to search is not just about fulfilling our physical needs.
  • when we get thrilled about the world of ideas, about making intellectual connections, about divining meaning, it is the seeking circuits that are firing.
Ed Webb

10 High Fliers on Twitter - Chronicle.com - 0 views

  • Twitter is quickly becoming a global faculty lounge. Sure, it's easy to waste a lot of time on the Internet-based microblogging service reading mundane details about people's days. But you can also pick up some great higher-education gossip, track down colleagues to collaborate with, or get advice on how to improve your teaching or research.
  • a rich soup of thought
  • editing the Web in real time
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • "A killer application of Twitter is conferences and conference reporting."
  • Academic discussions online often take place on closed e-mail lists, he says, when they should be happening in public forums like Twitter, so that a diverse group of outsiders can join in. "I think academics are actually missing a lot by not being involved in more of these social tools," he told me. "There are a lot of academics who think, 'If it's not coming from some other academic it's not worth a damn,' and that's not right."
  • "This is great for studying or following events as they unfold, but it is also useful for more traditional research if you can form or tap into a good network."
  • he joined Twitter hoping that it would help him demystify the job of college president by sharing details from his daily life. "It shows that you're not just living in a big house and begging" for money, he quipped. "You do get out and work."
1 - 14 of 14
Showing 20 items per page