Public and private dichotomy: social networking in higher education

While the use of online social networking services (SNS) is still largely attributed to leisure communication, online social networking services are gaining popularity in education and business. Social networks tie individuals together and online social networking services enable these ties through technology. People flock to web sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Tribe.net to keep in touch with friends, interest groups and family, communicate and share news about them. User friendliness of social networking technology has popularised SNSs and a growing body of research suggest various applications of social networking sites in higher education settings (for an overview see Benson, Filippaios and Morgan, 2010). Some practitioners view social networking services as a future platform for lifelong learning stretching beyond the virtual wall of institutional learning management systems. Furthermore, online social networking has been praised for its social capital potential beneficial for building professional connections and successful career management (Benson & Filippaios, 2010). Students, overwhelmingly comfortable with social technology, are already networking with classmates on Facebook, etc. and the thought of employing this familiar platform for learning and teaching has been tested by many HE institutions. However, issues arising from mixing informal communication platform with formal professional networking with potential employers and instructors are plenty. The prospect of personal content becoming available to the outsiders of an informal social circle is highly likely, is only one of the problem areas. This paper addresses the phenomenon of Public and Private Dichotomy, i.e. contextualisation of private and public content including communication and media shared through online social networks. Further research directions are discussed regarding successful strategies and factors hindering effective exploitation of SNSs in HE settings

Three Essays on Friend Recommendation Systems for Online Social Networks

Social networking sites (SNSs) first appeared in the mid-90s. In recent years, however, Web 2.0 technologies have made modern SNSs increasingly popular and easier to use, and social networking has expanded explosively across the web. This brought a massive number of new users. Two of the most popular SNSs, Facebook and Twitter, have reached one billion users and exceeded half billion users, respectively. Too many new users may cause the cold start problem. Users sign up on a SNS and discover they do not have any friends. Normally, SNSs solve this problem by recommending potential friends. The current major methods for friend recommendations are profile matching and “friends-of-friends.” The profile matching method compares two users’ profiles. This is relatively inflexible because it ignores the changing nature of users. It also requires complete profiles. The friends-of-friends method can only find people who are likely to be previously known to each other and neglects many users who share the same interests. To the best of my knowledge, existing research has not proposed guidelines for building a better recommendation system based on context information (location information) and user-generated content (UGC). This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay focuses on location information and then develops a framework for using location to recommend friends--a framework that is not limited to making only known people recommendations but that also adds stranger recommendations. The second essay employs UGC by developing a text analytic framework that discovers users’ interests and personalities and uses this information to recommend friends. The third essay discusses friend recommendations in a certain type of online community – health and fitness social networking sites, physical activities and health status become more important factors in this case. Essay 1: Location-sensitive Friend Recommendations in Online Social Networks GPS-embedded smart devices and wearable devices such as smart phones, tablets, smart watches, etc., have significantly increased in recent years. Because of them, users can record their location at anytime and anyplace. SNSs such as Foursquare, Facebook, and Twitter all have developed their own location-based services to collect users’ location check-in data and provide location-sensitive services such as location-based promotions. None of these sites, however, have used location information to make friend recommendations. In this essay, we investigate a new model to make friend recommendations. This model includes location check-in data as predictors and calculates users’ check-in histories--users’ life patterns--to make friend recommendations. The results of our experiment show that this novel model provides better performance in making friend recommendations. Essay 2: Novel Friend Recommendations Based on User-generated Contents More and more users have joined and contributed to SNSs. Users share stories of their daily life (such as having delicious food, enjoying shopping, traveling, hanging out, etc.) and leave comments. This huge amount of UGC could provide rich data for building an accurate, adaptable, effective, and extensible user model that reflects users’ interests, their sentiments about different type of locations, and their personalities. From the computer-supported social matching process, these attributes could influence friend matches. Unfortunately, none of the previous studies in this area have focused on using these extracted meta-text features for friend recommendation systems. In this study, we develop a text analytic framework and apply it to UGCs on SNSs. By extracting interests and personality features from UGCs, we can make text-based friend recommendations. The results of our experiment show that text features could further improve recommendation performance. Essay 3: Friend Recommendations in Health/Fitness Social Networking Sites Thanks to the growing number of wearable devices, online health/fitness communities are becoming more and more popular. This type of social networking sites offers individuals the opportunity to monitor their diet process and motivating them to change their lifestyles. Users can improve their physical activity level and health status by receiving information, advice and supports from their friends in the social networks. Many studies have confirmed that social network structure and the degree of homophily in a network will affect how health behavior and innovations are spread. However, very few studies have focused on the opposite, the impact from users’ daily activities for building friendships in a health/fitness social networking site. In this study, we track and collect users’ daily activities from Record, a famous online fitness social networking sites. By building an analytic framework, we test and evaluate how people’s daily activities could help friend recommendations. The results of our experiment have shown that by using the helps from these information, friend recommendation systems become more accurate and more precise

Influence of social networks on communication and culture

Má bakalářská práce je zaměřena na problematiku sociálních sítí a jejich vliv na dnešní společnost. Zabývá se jejich historií od prvotních pokusů až po nejnovější globální sociání sítě. Poté práce vysvětluje základní myšlenku vedoucí k vytvoření sociálních sítí i jejich charakteristické znaky. Dále nastiňuje problémy související se snadnou dostupností a nadměrným využíváním sociálních sítí, které následně ovlivňuje lidskou společnost. Práce se věnuje vlivu sociálních sítí na jazyk, mezilidskou komunikaci a kulturní adaptaci.My bachelor thesis is focused on issues with social networking services and their influence on modern society. It addresses their history from the very first attempts to create a social networking service to the modern global ones. Later the thesis provides an explanation of the creation of a social networking service and its characteristic traits. Furthermore it outlines problems connected with the availability and overuse of social networking services that are subsequently influencing the human society. The thesis also analyzes the influence of social networks on language, interpersonal communication and cultural adaptation.

Yunus Abdullah - Use of Social Media by Businesses: A New opportunity For Consulting Services by Accounting Firms

In the last 10 years, social media has been restructuring business policies and practices creating new business models. These models are shaping the internal and external aspects of businesses, improving efficiency, and hopefully yielding higher profits while reducing costs. At the same time, social media is being implemented in such internal operations as employee training, recruiting, communication within organizations, and building business loyalty. Businesses are becoming more dependent on social media, making social media an inevitable expectation of effective business models. The millennial are the new generation of adults who are taking over the business world. This generation of young adults grew up using such social media networks as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google +, and LinkedIn. To sustain good relationship with their clients (millennial), businesses must meet people\u27s expectation of the practices and plan their policies accordingly. This paper will examine how the use of social media by businesses is leading to a new service being offered by accounting firms, social media consulting. Experts in internal controls, accounting firms, will have the resources and capacity to offer services in social media consulting. The large accounting firms such as Deloitte, KPMG, Ernst &Young, and PWC have already entered social media consulting market.https://epublications.marquette.edu/mcnair_2013/1006/thumbnail.jp

Literature Overview - Privacy in Online Social Networks

In recent years, Online Social Networks (OSNs) have become an important\ud part of daily life for many. Users build explicit networks to represent their\ud social relationships, either existing or new. Users also often upload and share a plethora of information related to their personal lives. The potential privacy risks of such behavior are often underestimated or ignored. For example, users often disclose personal information to a larger audience than intended. Users may even post information about others without their consent. A lack of experience and awareness in users, as well as proper tools and design of the OSNs, perpetuate the situation. This paper aims to provide insight into such privacy issues and looks at OSNs, their associated privacy risks, and existing research into solutions. The final goal is to help identify the research directions for the Kindred Spirits project

The use of a social networking site with pre-enrolled Business School students to enhance their first year experience at university, and in doing so, improve retention

A Social Networking Site was explored as a medium for forging early links with students entering a UK University Business School within the North-West region. A Facebook page was specifically created for pre –enrolment contact with students coming to study on one of six pre-identified ‘retention hotspot’ courses within the department. Students firmly accepted offers to study on these courses in August 2011 and from this point, forthcoming students were invited to join the Facebook page. The Facebook page, alongside being informative, introduced forthcoming students to their prospective course mates as well as to the department, university and city. This pre-enrolment contact via Facebook aimed to engender students’ sense of belonging and facilitate social integration, not just to the student group but on a departmental level too. Sense of belonging and social integration are frequently highlighted in the literature as issues pertaining to student retention. An evaluation revealed positive feedback from the students about the Facebook page who reported that it helped to build friendships and networks earlier, faster and easier thus ultimately facilitating social integration and feelings of belonging. Figures revealed that students who were members of the Facebook page experienced higher levels of retention than non-Facebook page member

Social Networking and Business Performance: The case of Selected Entrepreneurs in Ota, Nigeria

This research study examined the nature of relationship between social networking and business performance using selected entrepreneurs in Ota, Nigeria as respondents. The specific objectives of the study are; (i) to ascertain the extent to which social media networks are used by entrepreneurs (ii)to find out the purpose for which those sites were visited (iii) to determine the effect of electronic networking on sales turnover and (iv) to identify the effect of physical networking on business efficiency. The study used survey research method with structured questionnaire that was distributed among the sampled respondents. The findings of the study revealed that Facebook and twitter were the mostly visited social network by the entrepreneurs for business purposes. The result further revealed that electronic social network has significant effect on sales turnover. Physical social network such as trade associations was also found having a significant effect on business efficiency. Based on these findings, conclusion was drawn and relevant recommendations were made

ON-LINE COMMUNICATION BY SOCIALIZATION SITES

Socialization online sites have become important landmarks for people all around the world and of all ages, especially for youth. Users of such services can socialize with people they know or with unknown, people located in the vicinity or at different distances, even on different continents. In other words, social online sites help people to interact with others of their kind, to know people who have the same passions as they have. The access to such sites is free and the members can build profiles (which include data on name, age, hobbies or favorite books and movies) and can share photos, music or videos with the others. A friend is, in the language of the socialization sites, any user who has a link to his/her profile page. Users can send messages or can leave comments on other profiles. In some cases, people who meet on such sites decide to meet also in the real life.internet, on-line, socialization sites, privacy

Harnessing Technology: analysis of emerging trends affecting the use of technology in education (September 2008)

Research to support the delivery and development of Harnessing Technology: Next Generation Learning 2008–1