Katt Blackwell-Starnes's List: Students and Social Networking

• empowering to users
• • Old school is an excellent point here. If we try to talk to our students about "bookmarking" in their browser, do they feel out of touch with what we're teaching them. If our methods are "old school" how relevant do they find the information we teach them?
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• an old school move
• “tags”
• Folksonomies
• RSS feed
• Diigo
• CiteULike
• schools
• collaborative groups, classrooms, or even entire districts decide on a unique tag that everyone can use when they bookmark something of interest
• At the University of Pennsylvania Library, there’s the “Penn Tags” program (tags.library.upenn.edu).

  • This is an excellent place to consider interviewing/studying for dissertation
• Developing self-organizational skills in this world of overwhelming information is key to enhancing your professional and personal learning practice. And the good news is, with tags and folksonomies, we’re all in this together.

  • My point exactly. If we teach students this skill, they can carry it not only into their personal lives, but further into their professional lives. This is Selber's "functional literacy."
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• empowering
• an old school move
• Developing self-organizational skills in this world of overwhelming information is key to enhancing your professional and personal learning practice. And the good news is, with tags and folksonomies, we’re all in this together

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• Much of the early research on online communities assumed that individuals using these systems would be connecting with others outside their pre-existing social group or location, liberating them to form communities around shared interests, as opposed to shared geography (Wellman, Salaff, Dimitrova, Garton, Gulia, & Haythornthwaite, 1996).
• • Lit Review--Social Capital
• social capital allows a person to draw on resources from other members of the networks to which he or she belongs.
• Access to individuals outside one's close circle provides access to non-redundant information, resulting in benefits such as employment connections
• • Putnam needs to be added to the lit review in this area. His work is prominent in all the early research on SNS.
• Putnam (2000) distinguishes between bridging and bonding social capital. The former is linked to what network researchers refer to as "weak ties," which are loose connections between individuals who may provide useful information or new perspectives for one another but typically not emotional support (Granovetter, 1982). Alternatively, bonding social capital is found between individuals in tightly-knit, emotionally close relationships, such as family and close friends. After briefly describing the extant literature on these two forms of social capital and the Internet, we introduce an additional dimension of social capital that speaks to the ability to maintain valuable connections as one progresses through life changes. This concept, "maintained social capital," permits us to explore whether online network tools enable individuals to keep in touch with a social network after physically disconnecting from it.
• 800 Michigan State University (MSU) undergraduate students was retrieved from the MSU registrar's office.
• A total of 286 students completed the online survey, yielding a response rate of 35.8% (see Table 1 for sample demographics). Demographic information about non-responders was not available; therefore we do not know whether a bias existed in regards to survey participation. However, when we compare the demographics of our sample to information we have about the MSU undergraduate population as a whole, our sample appears to be representative with a few exceptions. Female, younger, in-state, and on-campus students were slightly overrepresented in our sample.²
• • Students more prone to use off to online connections then online to offline
• Returning to our original research question, we can definitively state that there is a positive relationship between certain kinds of Facebook use and the maintenance and creation of social capital.
• Facebook appears to play an important role in the process by which students form and maintain social capital, with usage associated with all three kinds of social capital included in our instrument.

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• • Not pertinent to research--looks at the breakdown by race, ethnicity, and gender to each site.
• The analyses presented here are based on data representing a diverse group of mainly 18- and 19-year-old college students. The study was conducted in February and March of 2007 at the University of Illinois, Chicago, which is a U.S. urban public research university
• The project had the support of the First-Year Writing Program at the university, ensuring that a representative sample of the school's undergraduate student body would participate. The writing course offered through this program is the only course on campus that is required of all students; thus, enrollment in it does not pose any selection bias. Out of the 87 sections offered as part of this course, 85 took part in the study, constituting a 98% participation rate on the part of course sections. Overall, there was a final response rate of 82% based on all of the students enrolled in the course. In order to control for time in the program, this article focuses on students in the first-year class.

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• Lancaster, Sean, David C. Yen, Albert H. Huang, and Shin-Yuan Hung. “The Selection of Instant Messaging or E-mail: College Students’ Perspective for Computer Communication.” Information Management & Computer Security 15.1 (2007): 5-22.
• In terms of preferred use, more than 60% of respondents use IM for personal and social interaction, while less than 1% uses IM for work-related activities. Nearly 80% of respondents preferred using e-mail for work, and nearly 75% preferred using IM for social interaction. Sixty-three percent of respondents did not agree that IM is just as effective as face-to-face meetings, while nearly 75% did not agree that e-mail can be as effective as meeting face-to-face.

• Good summary of Lancaster et al. - Katt Blackwell-Starnes on 2010-03-14