June 2013
1 post
May 2013
2 posts
Debating 'The Innovative University' | Inside Higher Ed →
insidehighered.com
The book we’ve been waiting for
Play
October 2011
1 post
July 2011
1 post
Position paper - Google Docs →
docs.google.com
From Cameron Neylon
May 2011
4 posts
“In a new study of crowd wisdom — the statistical phenomenon by which individual biases cancel each other out, distilling hundreds or thousands of individual guesses into uncannily accurate average answers — researchers told test participants about their peers’ guesses. As a result, their group insight went awry.”
—Sharing Information Corrupts Wisdom of Crowds | Wired Science | Wired.com
“Social networks tend to disproportionally favor connections between individuals with either similar or dissimilar characteristics. This propensity, referred to as assortative mixing or homophily, is expressed as the correlation between attribute values of nearest neighbour vertices in a graph. Recent results indicate that beyond demographic features such as age, sex and race, even psychological states such as “loneliness” can be assortative in a social network. In spite of the increasing societal importance of online social networks it is unknown whether assortative mixing of psychological states takes place in situations where social ties are mediated solely by online networking services in the absence of physical contact. Here, we show that general happiness or Subjective Well-Being (SWB) of Twitter users, as measured from a 6 month record of their individual tweets, is indeed assortative across the Twitter social network. To our knowledge this is the first result that shows assortative mixing in online networks at the level of SWB. Our results imply that online social networks may be equally subject to the social mechanisms that cause assortative mixing in real social networks and that such assortative mixing takes place at the level of SWB. Given the increasing prevalence of online social networks, their propensity to connect users with similar levels of SWB may be an important instrument in better understanding how both positive and negative sentiments spread through online social ties. Future research may focus on how event-specific mood states can propagate and influence user behavior in “real life”.”
—[1103.0784] Happiness is assortative in online social networks
April 2011
1 post
March 2011
3 posts
“reater numbers of instructors are turning to social networking sites to communicate with students. This study examined whether posting social, scholarly, or a combination of social and scholarly information to Twitter has an impact on the perceived credibility of the instructor. Participants were assigned to one of three groups: a group that viewed social tweets, one that viewed scholarly tweets, and one that viewed a combination of social and scholarly tweets. Participants were then asked questions about the instructor’s perceived credibility. Results show that participants who viewed only the social tweets rated the instructor significantly higher in perceived credibility than the group that viewed only the scholarly tweets. No other significant differences were found among the groups. These results have implications for both teaching and learning, as there is an established link between perceived instructor credibility and positive learning outcomes.”
—The effect of Twitter posts on students’ perceptions of instructor credibility - Learning, Media and Technology
“This paper deals with the role of reciprocation in the formation of individuals’ social networks, that is to what extent initiating a relation brings about its reciprocation. Following the activity of a panel of bloggers over more than a year, we seek to establish whether bloggers are mainly involved in social networking or are part of the media industry. We adapt a standard capital investment model to study the effect of reciprocation on the building of social capital. Results of our analysis confirm that activity and reciprocation both play a role in the dynamics of social media.”
—SSRN-The Role of Reciprocation in Social Network Formation, with an Application to Blogging by Alexia Gaudeul, Caterina Giannetti
“The impact of social networks on lives of the majority of young adults has been enormous, although their impact on education is less well understood. Some consideration has been give to the role Facebook plays in higher education and in the transition from secondary to tertiary education, but little analysis has been conducted on the role of the microblogging social network Twitter. By examining the use made of this service by two cohorts of students, this study found that Twitter is easy for students to use and popular with the majority once they have experience with it. For this study different patterns of use between individuals in the study and between the two different student cohorts were observed, as was the emergence of informal online peer support networks. The results of this study suggest models for future use of microblogging services.”
—Science of the Invisible: Observing Emerging Student Networks on a Microblogging Service
January 2011
3 posts
“Our main purpose is to develop precise methods for measuring and evaluating the impact of research in the public sphere. We have begun to develop quantitative metrics for measuring impact and have performed comparative analyses based on a pilot study of 120 academics pulled from a variety of social science disciplines.”
—About | Impact of Social Sciences
Social Networking podcast →
downloads.bbc.co.uk
Rory Cellan-Jones on the beginning of social networking
News: 'Academically Adrift' - Inside Higher Ed →
insidehighered.com
Students don’t do much learning at college.
December 2010
4 posts
Digital drive | Harvard Gazette →
news.harvard.edu
Harvard’s use of technology
“It is perfectly reasonable to suggest that a ‘community’ the size of UK Higher Education would realise value in replicating less (not nothing) at every university campus across the country, and bringing much of that together in some sort of Cloud.”
—In a world of niche Clouds, how do you define a useful niche? | Paul Miller - The Cloud of Data
“One of the world’s largest publishers, Pearson, looks set to be given degree-awarding powers, as the government seeks to open up the university sector to more private providers.”
—BBC News - Publishing giant Pearson looks set to offer degrees
