To Tweet in classroms?

Using social media is becoming common way of communicating, especially between young people. Because people seem to spend a lot of time on Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and similar media, some have developed a strong negative attitude towards these new tools for communication. Those new media are problematic especially in education institutions, because it seems like students' attention is not where it should be because the just can't get off Facebook or can't stop Tweeteing, even during the class lectures. So the simple solution is to prohibit using this tools when in schools and universities. But is this really the best solution? It sure isn't a very creative one.

Some teachers and professors decided to take a different kind of approach. I've examined videos on You Tube, which present some examples of using Twitter for educational purposes and found some interesting cases:

First see a short video about using social networking in the classroom: Introduction

Cases of using Twitter in class:


Minneapolis Roosevelt High School

University of Texas

La Crosse Middle School





The main and very obvious argument why to use social media in class is that students use these tools to communicate with each other outside a classroom- so why not use it in class, too? Because students are interested in new ways of communication, why not incorporate this in education process?

Here are the advantages of using Twitter in classroom, which were presented in the above videos:

Using Twitter in class:

• Catching the attention of the students
• Increasing their participation
• Enabling more people to discuss the material at the same time
• Enabling students to return to the discussions and read them again
• Enabling the shy-ones to speak up
• It gets students more incorporated into the class
• Enables everyone to express their opinion
• Encourages participation
• Enables student collaboration

Using Twitter outside class:

• Enables to notify students about assignments
• Enables easy communication between teachers and students outside classroom
• Enables publishing of class announcements
• Enables students to connect and follow experts from different fields
• Enables teachers to publish suggestions for books and literature
• Enables teachers to publish reports about student's work for their parents
• Enables teachers to connect with other teachers in their subject area and learn from each other

Of course there are some limitations of the tool, especially because it enables very limited space for communication, and sometimes discussions require more in-depth arguments. But on the other hand the limited space encourages students to be brief and focused in their communication. There are also some concerns about mixing student's and teacher's private Twitter accounts with professional tasks, but this can easily be solved by creating two different Twitter accounts.

I believe that teachers and professors should consider the benefits of using Twitter in classes instead of disapproving and forbidding them in advance. And if they can think of a proper use, they should take the step and try it. I'm sure that the students will appreciate it very much.

Wiki-what?

When you turned on TV or turned a few pages of newspapers or clicked on online news few months ago, you couldn't miss stories about Wikileaks. Every day there was something new. Than there was substantial news coverage about Julian Assange and the Swedish lawsuits against him. And then? Nothing? Where did he go? What happened to Wikileaks?

Actually the nonprofit organization, called Wikileaks is still quite active on its website. The last news were posted on April 24th, relating to Guantanamo. Before that post, they didn't publish anything since February, but I wouldn't say that it indicates their devolution.

What is interesting is the fact that traditional news don't report about Wikileaks as much as they did when the organization first published some confidential files. I think that this case really shows us how traditional media still set agenda, despite the development and advantages of the new media. If television stations and newspapres wouldn't report about Wikileaks, most people wouldn't hear about it.

Although new media offer an opportunity for the suppresed voices to speak and publish information, which traditional media wouldn't dare to publish, they still need the "old" media to help them be heard.

See what Julian Assange has told about why the world needs Wikileaks here, or place yourself in Julian's shoes and try to steal secret files to Obama here.

Playstation network hacked! What do users say?

As you probably know already, Sony suffered a massive breach in its Playstation network (see short news clip) that led to theft of personal information, belonging to 77 million user accounts. It is one of the larges security break ins. This event shows how vulnerable we really are online, because our personal information are being exposed. When we register to different tools and websites online, we often have to provide our personal information and we put them in the hand of website owners. The safety of our personal information depends on some company’s security system. In the case of Playstation network, hackers broke into the system and accessed personal information of the users and maybe even credit card information (see how it happened here) And what happens now? Some lawsuits have already been filed against Sony and the courts will decide whether the company will have to pay the users for the damage, caused by the break in.

I was interested in the users’ response to this event, so I decided to look on Playstation forum. I followed some of the discussions about the event and I found out that people are mostly talking about next few issues:

• When will Playstation network start to work again? Some of the people who took part in the discussion are not worried about the event, they are just unhappy because they are unable to play online.

• Who is to blame for the event – Sony or the hackers? A debate evolved around a question about who should the users be angry at. Some are convinced that it is Sony’s fault; because they didn’t provide sufficient security, but others believe that in these days it is impossible to defend against very capable cyber-criminals and are very sympathetic to the company.

• To panic or not to panic? Some users have warned others that they have already received some suspicious e-mails and are wondering if it is connected to the breach. A few users responded to such posts with mocking and insults. They are convinced that those e-mails are just regularly spam messages and are sure that there is nothing to be afraid of.

• What to do? There are also some posts from people who are looking for advice what to do. Users have shared their experiences and told other what they have done. Some have immediately canceled their credit cards, while others believe that this is not necessary because even if the hackers did stole credit card information, they don’t have all the information needed for abusing them.

If you are interested in the debate, see Playstation forum.

Internet is changing our viewing habits

I was just watching my favorite TV series on my computer and I thought about an important aspect of the new media, which relates to people's free time. Although I'm not a big fan of spending time in front of TV, I admit that sometimes it feels really nice and relaxing to just sit down and watch some movie or series or show that is on. But I think that the TV program here in Slovenia is not very good, because the same movies and series are being played over and over again. And before internet came along, you just didn’t have other options than to accept it.

But now, you don’t have to be a passive TV consumer aka “couch potato”. You can choose. And not just between different TV programs, but also between series and movies, which are broadcasted all over the world. You just need a computer, fast internet connection, and you can have an episode of your favorite series on your computer few hours after it was premiered in some US television station. It would be interesting to investigate the viewing patterns of different groups of people, because I think that more and more people download series and shows, which are not available on their national TV programs.

Political propaganda on Facebook

This week's readings for our course referred to the new media and politics. And just this Sunday, there was a referendum about the organization of student work here in Slovenia. The campaigns against and for the suggested reform were quite huge. But what seemed interesting to me, was the propaganda on Facebook. I confirmed my attendance on Facebook event, which was called something like “On Sunday I will vote against the small work”. I was following the debate on this Facebook page for some days and it became obvious to me, that there were two or three users, who constantly promoted the law about little work, presented their arguments (which were exactly the same as the government’s arguments) for acceptance of the law and sometimes they even directly assaulted people, who expressed their disagreement with them as stupid o naïve and out-dated. I became suspicious about their postings, because it looked like,they were on that Facebook page all day and answered to different post almost simultaneously as they were published. I decided to check their profiles, and I found out that they were probably fake. One of them didn’t even used a real name, but called himself Mavrični Bojevnik (Rainbow Warrior) and has joined only groups, which had something to do with politics, mostly pages about premier Pahor, governmental party SD or the mentioned law about little work.

Obviously, political parties are aware that with new media, new places for deliberation and political organization are emerging and are trying to influence them. I am pretty sure that they've payed someone to follow the debates about this new law on Facebook and try to discredit different beliefs and opinions. As results of the referendum showed, they didn’t succeed.

Annotating PDFs

In previous week we had an assignment to try some tools, which are available for annotating text. I tried Zotero and it bothered me that you couldn't edit PDFs, whereas most academic articles are in such format. I tried to find another program for annotations, which enables editing of PDFs and I found a tool, called PDF Annotator.

It's very easy to use and it enables you to highlight text in different colours, write comments in a form of "sticky notes" or even paste stamps next to the text to mark important arguments or things you find problematic in the article. I found this tool very useful, but unfortunatelly it is available for free only for 30 days trial period and then you have to pay €69,95.

The tool is available for downloading here !

Grandma is going online?

Few days ago I was visiting my grandma and she told me that she needs to buy herself a computer and get internet connection. Although my grandma is a very active person, she really doesn’t get along with technology. She can’t even figure out her mobile phone’s functions or set channels on her TV and VCR and now she suddenly wants a computer? I was pretty skeptical about her idea, so I asked her why she thinks that she needs computer and internet. She said that everything is on internet nowadays and she even complained about the commercials which are always referring to companies’ websites and say: read more on our website. And that really bothered her, because she felt that she is excluded from certain part of modern life, because she doesn’t have a computer.

In my last blog post I wrote about digital divide and this conversation with my grandma got me to thinking about the social exclusion of older people, who don’t know how to use a computer. And besides that I have been working in Statistical office of the Republic of Slovenia where we’ve just finished a telephone survey about the use of communication- informational technologies in Slovenian households. I worked as a telephone interviewer, so I spoke to many people, who answered questions about their use of computers and internet. It was very hard to convince older people to participate in our survey because when they heard that it is about computers and internet, they immediately refused with excuse that they are too old for and that they don’t know anything about these new technologies. But on the other hand, there were some older people who learned how to use computers and internet by taking classes, organized specifically for older generations. They often told me that they decided to take such classes because in modern times, you just cannot afford to not know how to use internet if you don’t want to be excluded from numerous activities.

It really seems that technological exclusion of older people is quite a problem, because it also means that they are socially excluded from society. For younger generations it feels almost natural to have a computer and know how to use it, because we ether grew up with computers and mobile phones and internet, or got in touch with these new technologies at very young age. But older generations on the other hand were already grown up, used to certain way of life and the suddenly those new technologies emerged and changed everyday life. So we should really consider their difficulties with accepting these technologies and their efforts to try to follow the developments and even encourage them to try it and comfort them that they are never too old to learn new things and get new experiences.

So let’s held our grandma’s and grandpa’s to get online if they want to! :)

Internet access as a legal right in Finland

The problem of social stratification used to refer to the notion of social classes in society. The society was divided into working class, middle class and upper-class, where social, cultural and economic capital played an important role in determining where someone stands within society. Nowadays scholars often talk about two class society, information rich and information poor.

The information rich have access to information and information technology equipment such as many TV and radio channels, books, newspapers and journals, and of course computers and the World Wide Web. The information rich also have the knowledge to use the technology to obtain information to help them make informed decisions.

The information poor tend to not have access to the Web and probably find it difficult to access relevant books and journals. Even in general conversations a discussion about a TV programme shown on satellite TV will be lost on people who only have 4 or 5 terrestrial channels. The information poor may lack the skills or knowledge to access information.

The gap between the information rich and the information poor is often called the digital divide. It is not a gap between those with lots of money and those without, although money certainly have influence on this division.

The gap can exist between many groups in society such as:

* old and young

* english speaking and non english speaking

* third world and developed world society

* diffierent cultural groups

* rural and urban locations

FINLAND

One of the problems of digital divide is also internet access. And Finland is the first county in the world who made internet access a legal right. From July 2010 telecommunication companies in Finland are required to provide all 5,2 million citizens with internet connection that runs at speeds of at least 1 megabit per second.

Finland was already one of the most wired countries in the world, with 95% of the population having some sort of Internet access.

Enabling people to have internet access is of course a promising start in abolishing the digital gap, but is not enough. People get technical access to the internet, but if they don’t know how to use computers and internet, it doesn’t really change anything. Education is also an important chapter in the problem of digital divide between information rich and information poor. And by education I don’t just mean knowledge how to use computers and internet but also capability to find relevant information, to know how to discriminate between credible sources of information and questionable sources.

Finland certainly made a step forward, will other countries follow its lead?

Using Facebook to pump up your ego!

Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison wrote in their article "Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scolarship" that Facebook is egocentric network, because the individual is at the center of its own community. This differs from early public online communities, where topics, common interests or hobbies were central.

In my opinion Facebook really is egocentric, also from a different perspective. Facebook can be understood as egocentric tool because it helps individuals to pump their egos up.

SHOW OFF YOUR FRIENDS

Facebook enables people to make visible their social networks or if we put it simple, we can see how many “friends” an individual has. Of course we are not talking about real friends here, because it would be impossible for a person to maintain as many friendships as they have listed on Facebook. Anyways just because there is a counter of how many friends a user has, many people feel some kind of competition to have as many friends as possible, to show others that they are popular.

Here is an interesting article about collecting friends on Facebook, which reveals that most people have 5 close friends and an average of 150 people in their social network. The article also mentions so called “trophy friends” which mostly refer to Facebook profiles of celebrities.

Another interesting article about collecting friends on Facebook is available here and it also mentions an interesting phenomenon of “defriending”.

SHOW EVERYONE THAT YOU’VE ENJOYED YOUSELF

People are now able to share their photos from holidays, travels and trips with their friends. If we are honest, Facebook actually enables to “show off”, to let everyone see how you’ve enjoyed yourself and maybe even make them jealous.

TELL EVERYONE WHAT HAS JUST HAPPENED TO YOU

When something amazing or terrible happens to you and there is no one around to tell him, you can just update your Facebook status and pour your feelings and thoughts to your wall and your friends’ news feed. Then you wait. You wait for the “likes” and comments and feel good about the attention you’ve received.

LET EVERYONE SEE WHERE YOU ARE PLANNING TO GO

When people confirm their attendance to Facebook events, they enable all of their friend to see where they will be at certain point of time. And maybe even latently brag about it.

Of course not everyone use Facebook in such way, but I’m sure that in some way people really do pump up their egos with Facebook. Admit it or not, you feel good when you publish something and gets many “likes” and comments from friends. Using Facebook for bragging or not, it is a fact that we do things there, we wouldn’t do in face to face interactions with friends.

And here is the proof! See it for yourself how our Facebook activities would like like in face to face communication.