The Role of Social Media in Developing Online Learning Communities

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of social media in develop-ing learning communities in both formal and informal learning contexts. The study was based on a theoretical framework to examine online learning communities from three levels: individual, interactional and group. This study selected two cases: the first case was a formal learning group that used networked learning via Twitter and WhatsApp within a blended learning environment in an academic module; this for-mal learning group was controlled by the teacher of the module. The second case was an informal learning group that used Twitter and WhatsApp to learn and prac-tise English as a second language; this group was created and informally organised by an active member on Twitter who was interested in teaching and practising Eng-lish. Semi-structured interviews, focus groups and WhatsApp discussion samples were the three main data collection methods of this study. The data were analysed using three procedures. Firstly, a thematic analysis of the interviews was conducted to generate a thematic research map and create a coding scheme for analysing the content of the WhatsApp discussions. Secondly, a social network analysis (SNA) was applied to the WhatsApp group discussions to map out the interactions among group members and select the sample of WhatsApp discussion for the third data analysis procedure. The third procedure was content analysis (CA), which was ap-plied to the WhatsApp conversations that occurred during the selected sample (the three most active and connected weeks). Findings from the SNA and CA were used to triangulate the results of the thematic analysis. The findings revealed that the ex-istence of similar learning needs, interactive communication among members and using appropriate communication tools are the main factors that develop online learning communities on social media. Also, it showed that the main function of us-ing Twitter for learning purposes was to develop the academic and social presence of the students/learners, while the main learning function of using WhatsApp was to provide an instant and open communication environment for online learning com-munity members. However, there were different uses of these applications in formal and informal learning contexts, which were described in the study

Questions that Have Arisen since the EU Decision on the Whatsapp Acquisition by Facebook

On October 3rd, 2014, the European Commission (EC) concluded the analysis of the transaction by which Facebook, Inc. (“Facebook”, USA) had acquired WhatsApp Inc. (“WhatsApp”, USA) by way of a purchase of shares for US$ 19 billion, which contributed to Facebook’s strategy of focusing its business on mobile development (Case no. COMP/M.7217). In its decision, the EC stated that the deal would raise no competition concerns and authorised the proposed acquisition of WhatsApp by Facebook concluding that Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are not close competitors and that consumers would continue to have a wide choice of alternatives for consumer communication apps after the acquisition. The EC analysed potential data concentration issues only within the scope that the acquisition could weigh down competition in the online advertising market. Privacy-related concerns from the increased concentration of data within the control of Facebook because of the deal with WhatsApp are not an EU Competition Law matter. Notwithstanding, just some months after the decision two national competition authorities (Germany and Italy) opened procedures against Facebook. In Germany, the Bundeskartellamt initiated in March 2016 a proceeding against Facebook – Facebook Inc., USA, the Irish subsidiary of the company, and Facebook Germany GmbH, Hamburg – on suspicion that  Facebook had abused its market power by infringing data protection rules with its specific terms of service on the use of user data. In Italy, in May 2017, the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM) fined WhatsApp EUR 3 million for having forced its users to share their personal data with Facebook as a conclusion of two investigations opened in October 2016 concerning infringements of the Consumer Code. The present article proposes to answer three main questions concerning the EC decision on the WhatsApp acquisition by Facebook: (i) Did the EC apply the best tools to analyse the case?; (ii) Could the EC have addressed a decision that would somehow interfere in the privacy field?; and (iii) Could the procedures in Germany and Italy have been avoided

Visual communication in practice: A texto-material approach to WhatsApp in Mexico City

With more than 2 billion users, WhatsApp is one of the most important mobile technologies in the world. Accordingly, scholarly interest in WhatsApp has grown in recent years. However, studies have tended to separate WhatsApp’s visual and textual elements from the analysis of its technological infrastructure. Alternatively, we argue for a “texto- material” approach that examines the links between both dimensions. We elaborate on the analytical gains that come from this approach by examining the use of WhatsApp in Mexico City. We posit that considering how textual/visual elements and technological features are interwoven is crucial for understanding the cultural specificity of WhatsApp’s development and use in places like Latin America.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM

What’s up, Switzerland? A corpus-based research project in a multilingual country

This paper offers some initial insights into the first large-scale and multilingual corpus of WhatsApp messages for linguistic research and the related research project “What’s up, Swit-zerland?”. Data was gathered in Switzerland in the summer of 2014 and will be made availa-ble to the academic public online at the end of the project (end of 2018). This article presents facts and figures about the corpus and the participants’ demographic data as well as an over-view of (the lack of) existing linguistic research in the field and the research intended in the SNSF-funded research project

Share and multiply: modeling communication and generated traffic in private WhatsApp groups

Group-based communication is a highly popular communication paradigm, which is especially prominent in mobile instant messaging (MIM) applications, such as WhatsApp. Chat groups in MIM applications facilitate the sharing of various types of messages (e.g., text, voice, image, video) among a large number of participants. As each message has to be transmitted to every other member of the group, which multiplies the traffic, this has a massive impact on the underlying communication networks. However, most chat groups are private and network operators cannot obtain deep insights into MIM communication via network measurements due to end-to-end encryption. Thus, the generation of traffic is not well understood, given that it depends on sizes of communication groups, speed of communication, and exchanged message types. In this work, we provide a huge data set of 5,956 private WhatsApp chat histories, which contains over 76 million messages from more than 117,000 users. We describe and model the properties of chat groups and users, and the communication within these chat groups, which gives unprecedented insights into private MIM communication. In addition, we conduct exemplary measurements for the most popular message types, which empower the provided models to estimate the traffic over time in a chat group