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"For the third consecutive year, the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth has conducted a study that looks at the usage of social media among Inc. 500 companies. The 2009 results confirm that America's fastest growing private companies adopt social media marketing initiatives at much higher rates than other companies, and that interest in social media has grown since the first study was conducted in 2007.

Conducted by researchers Nora Ganim Barnes and Eric Mattson, this year's study looked at 148 of the 500 companies on the 2009 list. As was the case in each of the past two years, respondents were asked about their usage and familiarity with six types of social media tools, including blogging, podcasting, online video, social networking, message boards, and wikis. According to the study, social media usage by companies on the Inc. 500 has grown in the past year, with 91 percent of companies reporting that they use at least one social media tool, compared with 77 percent of companies surveyed in 2008. Of the six social media categories covered in the survey, the one that continues to be the most familiar to Inc. 500 companies is social networking, with 75 percent saying that they are "very familiar with it.""

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research business pres_ideas network_Literacy parent_book shifts

"The communication and information professors, Mor Naaman and Jeffrey Boase, found that there tend to be two types of Twitter folks. The majority, or 80 percent, were what they called ``meformers'' -- Twitter users who sent out messages that revolved around themselves, updating others about their activities or sharing thoughts and feelings.

The other 20 percent are ``informers'' -- people who were actually sharing information. Not surprisingly, the informers tended to have larger social networks and be more interactive."

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twitter research network_Literacy 4thedition

"Interim results, released to Times Higher Education, show that only a small proportion of those surveyed are using technology such as virtual-research environments, social bookmarking, data and text mining, wikis, blogs and RSS-feed alerts in their work. This contrasts with the fact that many respondents professed to finding technological tools valuable.

Just under half of those polled used RSS feeds and only about 10 per cent used social bookmarking, with Generation Y students exhibiting the same behaviour as other age groups.

The study found that Google and Google Scholar are the main sources used by doctoral students to locate information; that only about half have been trained to find journal articles; and that far fewer have received any training in using more advanced technological research tools, such as e-research."

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plpresearch research shifts statistics network_literacy

"In two surveys reported this year by Pew Internet Research -- of 700 and 935 teens, respectively -- 38 percent of respondents ages 12 to 14 said they had an online profile of some sort.

Sixty-one percent of those in the study, ages 12 to 17, said they use social-networking sites to send messages to friends, and 42 percent said they do so every day.

The data in the study was from 2006, so it's not a stretch to assume those numbers are higher this year. Research on younger children is limited, but anecdotal evidence shows that many of them are also logging on.

"Of course they are," said Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at Pew and one of the report's authors. "They're using them because that's where their social world is. Because there's no effective way to age-verify ... children very quickly realize, 'I just say I'm 14 years old, and they'll let me use this.' ""

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facebook parent_book research social

The goal of this study was to learn about how college students are using the Internet and to compare their use of it to that of college students as reported in 2002 by replicating and extending previous research. A survey of college students at 40 U.S. higher education institutions was conducted, along with observations and interviews at several Midwestern universities. For comparison to the general population a nationwide telephone survey was undertaken. The study found that Internet use had predictably increased but that college students continued to prefer using multiple methods of communication to stay in touch with friends and family. College students continue to be early adopters of new Internet tools and applications in comparison to the general U.S. Internet–using population. For U.S. college students, Internet technologies have become so ubiquitous as to seem invisible.

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4thedition pres_ideas higher_ed research

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”

The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.

Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

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research online_learning shifts

According to a 2008 survey by Technorati, which runs a search engine for blogs, only 7.4 million out of the 133 million blogs the company tracks had been updated in the past 120 days. That translates to 95 percent of blogs being essentially abandoned, left to lie fallow on the Web, where they become public remnants of a dream — or at least an ambition — unfulfilled.

Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.

www.nytimes.com/...07blogs.html - Preview

blogging connective_writing research

The ongoing debate on the effectiveness of technology use for student learning outcomes still seems to have no clear answers. Recently, some institutions have decided to end their laptop programs for students because of the economic challenges facing those institutions. But there is no consistent response as to the effect on students. Some say it has been highly effective for students, and others say that it has not had any significant impact in how students learn.

What is interesting is that there is also no real agreement as to what should be measured or even whether it can be measured in order to quantify success in this regard. Institutions--whether K-12 or higher education--that have adopted technology for instruction often have little or no systematic methodology in place for instructional technology use or how its success can or should be measured. Rather, the technology use has typically relied upon individual teachers and faculty who have given up time to learn and use new technology and who are always underfunded and unable, as a result, to expand their use to other programs and other instructors for ongoing research.

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parent_book research technology

What this year's survey found was that "there continues to be a digital disconnect, shall we say, between the way students are learning and living outside of school and the way they're interacting with technology inside of school," said Evans. "In fact, students tell us that they have to power down to go to school, and then, at the end of the school day, they power back up again--a real disconnect in the way students are viewing technology from the adults in their educational lives."

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parent_book pres_ideas research shifts students

While school leaders (rightly) focus on the importance of the Internet in students' lives and education, we ought to also seriously be considering what this report says about how we communicate with our parents and communities. And asking what exepectations we should have of all teachers of an online presence and use of digital communications.

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3rdedition research shifts

While interest-driven sites such as fan sites and gaming and hobby sites were places that youth might connect with unknown others and adults, they did not connect to these sites as spaces to look for sex or romantic partners. By contrast, social network sites were places where kids flirt with one another, but they see these sites as spaces to connect with others their age, or perhaps slightly older or younger, but not as a place to connect with undefined others. They also thought that adult strangers who tried to connect with them on these sites were creepy and deviant. By contrast, many of them described how these peer groups in social network sites often replicated the kind of “drama” (or bullying) that they experience among peers at school. These social norms that kids described to us are clearly reflected in the task force findings.

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safety parent_book research

Abstract: As social network sites like MySpace and Facebook emerged, American teenagers began adopting them as spaces to mark identity and socialize with peers. Teens leveraged these sites for a wide array of everyday social practices - gossiping, flirting, joking around, sharing information, and simply hanging out. While social network sites were predominantly used by teens as a peer-based social outlet, the unchartered nature of these sites generated fear among adults. This dissertation documents my 2.5-year ethnographic study of American teens' engagement with social network sites and the ways in which their participation supported and complicated three practices - self-presentation, peer sociality, and negotiating adult society.

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research danah_boyd social_network

I was taking a look at all the resources that I had collected during 2008 in my LearnTech Library as well as those that I had posted in the LearnTech News, to identify those that I particularly enjoyed, that inspired me, made me think and/or I just found

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research reading elearning

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of

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research education teaching must_read plpresearch

Students for whom performance is paramount want to look smart even if it means not learning a thing in the process. For them, each task is a challenge to their self-image, and each setback becomes a personal threat. So they pursue only activities at which

www.stanfordalumni.org/...dweck.html - Preview

research learning kids

The researchers of iCAMP (Intercultural learning campus), a three-year project funded by the European Union, wanted to create software tools that would let university students and teachers work together on structured, self-directed learning projects no ma

www.sciencedaily.com/...081204074804.htm - Preview

research blogging learning higher_ed

One qualitative study, which surely won’t be welcomed by manufacturers of basic word processing software, found that students who create and edit documents using Web-based collaboration tools include more complex visual media in their assignments — and co

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classroom learning feedback parentbook research pedagogy

Nice list of research dealing with media use of kids and adults.

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media_literacy parentbook research media

New media allow for a degree of freedom and autonomy for youth that is less apparent in classroom setting. Youth respect one another’s authority online, and they are often more motivated to learn from peers than from adults. Their efforts are also largel

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plpresearch parentbook research must_read

Online degrees are no longer causing redflags on resumes for employers. In fact, many attributes of the onlinelearner are what employers seek. They want lifelong learners,self-motivated workers, and critical thinkers -- all of which apply toonline learner

www.ibtimes.com/...online-degrees.htm - Preview

learning elearning research network_literacy