Evaluative Language and Its Solidarity-Building Role on TED.com: An Appraisal and Corpus Analysis

Language is a key resource in the formation of online communities, which are in turn central to an understanding of contemporary social relations. This study looks at TED.com, an educational video-hosting platform with few in-built community-building functionalities, to explore the potential for users to affiliate through their language choices. Grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics, the study uses the Appraisal framework, extended using corpus linguistic methods, in order to analyse users’ reactions to TED videos. The study shows that online participants use evaluative language to align with certain ideas and, based on these affinities, form affiliations characterized by sociability and solidarity. These affiliations raise important questions about the conception of ‘community’ in twenty-first century society

The Double-edged Sword: A Mixed Methods Study of the Interplay between Bipolar Disorder and Technology Use

Human behavior is increasingly reflected or acted out through technology. This is of particular salience when it comes to changes in behavior associated with serious mental illnesses including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Early detection is crucial for these conditions but presently very challenging to achieve. Potentially, characteristics of these conditions\u27 traits and symptoms, at both idiosyncratic and collective levels, may be detectable through technology use patterns. In bipolar disorder specifically, initial evidence associates changes in mood with changes in technology-mediated communication patterns. However much less is known about how people with bipolar disorder use technology more generally in their lives, how they view their technology use in relation to their illness, and, perhaps most crucially, the causal relationship (if any exists) between their technology use and their disease. To address these uncertainties, we conducted a survey of people with bipolar disorder (N = 84). Our results indicate that technology use varies markedly with changes in mood and that technology use broadly may have potential as an early warning signal of mood episodes. We also find that technology for many of these participants is a double-edged sword: acting as both a culprit that can trigger or exacerbate symptoms as well as a support mechanism for recovery. These findings have implications for the design of both early warning systems and technology-mediated interventions

Are digital natives a myth or reality?: Students’ use of technologies for learning

This paper outlines the findings of a study investigating the extent and nature of use of digital technologies by undergraduate students in Social Work and Engineering, in two British universities. The study involved a questionnaire survey of students (n=160) followed by in-depth interviews with students (n=8) and lecturers and support staff (n=8) in both institutions. Firstly, the findings suggest that students use a limited range of technologies for both learning and socialisation. For learning, mainly established ICTs are used- institutional VLE, Google and Wikipedia and mobile phones. Students make limited, recreational use of social technologies such as media sharing tools and social networking sites. Secondly, the findings point to a low level of use of and familiarity with collaborative knowledge creation tools, virtual worlds, personal web publishing, and other emergent social technologies. Thirdly, the study did not find evidence to support the claims regarding students adopting radically different patterns of knowledge creation and sharing suggested by some previous studies. The study shows that students’ attitudes to learning appear to be influenced by the approaches adopted by their lecturers. Far from demanding lecturers change their practice, students appear to conform to fairly traditional pedagogies, albeit with minor uses of technology tools that deliver content. Despite both groups clearly using a rather limited range of technologies for learning, the results point to some age differences, with younger, engineering students making somewhat more active, albeit limited, use of tools than the older ones. The outcomes suggest that although the calls for radical transformations in educational approaches may be legitimate it would be misleading to ground the arguments for such change solely in students’ shifting expectations and patterns of learning and technology use

How mobile instant messaging affects public employees’ daily work: An empirical examination based on stressor-strain-outcome model

The phenomenon of excessive instant messaging usage in the workplace has garnered increasing attention in recent years. Despite its pervasiveness, extant literature predominantly focused on the psychological well-being, with the subsequent influences on work performance remaining largely unexplored. Using data from street-level bureaus in China, this study examines how work-oriented mobile instant messaging stressors result in psychological reactions and daily work performance decrement as well. Results demonstrate that information overload, compulsive usage and normative response pressure are significant predictors of strain which was represented by cognitive fatigue, emotional fatigue and invasion of life. These strain constructs can further impair individual’s work performance. The findings from this research provide meaningful theoretical insights and carry practical implications

Innovate Magazine / Annual Review 2011-2012

This year\u27s issue highlights some of the ways the SJSU School of Library and Information Science is being a catalyst for global innovation, explores the tools SJSU SLIS master\u27s students and faculty use to interact in our innovative online learning environment, and describes some of the exciting career pathways our alum are pursuing.https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/innovate/1000/thumbnail.jp

Using WhatsApp for International Speaking Exam Preparation

Computer based testing has become a prevailing tendency in education. However, the increasing importance of preparation related to this type of testing has hardly been addressed in academic research, and even less has been done to investigate using technology to prepare for these technological speaking exams. The WhatsApp application has become popular with the majority of students as a means of communicating to individuals and groups. I hope to show the benefits of using this common, popular messaging application for speaking preparation for an international exam. This case study approach uses three small groups of students from the University Del Norte, Barranquilla, Colombia who are preparing for the TOEFL international exam. The sixteen students received thirty hours of classroom teaching which was supported by their WhatsApp group for exam preparation speaking. Simulating the exam conditions we aimed to investigate the benefits and perceptions of the use of WhatsApp for speaking preparation purposes. The study revealed that imitating the exam on WhatsApp proved a valuable and very positive experience for the vast majority of students. Familiarisation of the requirements, exam format and opportunities for self, peer and teacher evaluation were all noted as benefits although some issues of privacy regarding the technology was also raised.MaestríaMagister en la Enseñanza del Ingle

End-user perspectives on the Adoption of Wireless Applications: Price of Convenience and a Model for Contextual Analysis

Information services delivered via wireless, portable communication devices continue to pervade our work and leisure spaces. While people are continuously bombarded with promises of newer and better ways to maintain contact with others and to have constant access to information, however, there remain a number of open issues that inhibit the potential for an open information society. The bidirectional influence between such wireless technologies and applications and their potential end-users, contributes to the development of both the technologies and applications and the social setting in which they are embedded. In this paper, we extend current studies of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) uptake by integrating interpretations of “ubiquitous computing” and its pervasion of everyday life. We draw upon findings from a range of IS research to structure our future studies of adoption issues in relation to a variety of wireless application cases. We show that, while some “traditional” IS/IT dimensions of uptake still hold, there are now a variety of other “non- utilitarian (hedonic)” factors that developers and designers need to take into account. We conclude by proposing a research model – expanded from model of user acceptability and product uptake, a descriptive framework based on the “Price of Convenience”(Ng-Kruelle, Swatman, Rebne and Hampe 2002)