Breaking It Down and Building Them Up: Helping Students Develop Discussion Skills in an Upper-Level Seminar Course

As students enter upper-division courses, many are required to lead and manage discussions. Ultimately, students are assessed on whether they were effective discussion leaders. But, what does this mean? A challenge that students may face as novice discussion leaders is that the task of managing a discussion is complex and requires multiple skills—these may not be readily apparent. In this case study, we employed an instructional intervention to help make discussion skills more obvious and accessible to students

2024 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report : teaching and learning edition

Collection : Horizon Report"This report profiles the trends and key technologies and practices shaping the future of teaching and learning, and envisions a number of scenarios for that future. It is based on the perspectives and expertise of a global panel of leaders from across the higher education landscape." -- EDUCAUS

Locative Media and Sociability:Using Location-Based Social Networks to Coordinate Everyday Life

Foursquare was a mobile social networking application that enabled people to share location with friends in the form of “check-ins.” The visualization of surrounding known social connections as well as unknown others has the potential to impact how people coordinate social encounters and forge new social ties. While many studies have explored mobile phones and sociability, there is a lack of empirical research examining location-based social network’s (LSBNs) from a sociability perspective. Drawing on a dataset of original qualitative research with a range of Foursquare users, the paper examines the application in the context of social coordination and sociability in three ways. First, the paper explores if Foursquare is used to organize certain social encounters, and if so, why. Second, the paper examines the visualization of surrounding social connections and whether this leads to “serendipitous encounters.” Lastly, the paper examines whether the use of Foursquare can produce new social relationships

Estimation of privacy risk through centrality metrics

[EN] Users are not often aware of privacy risks and disclose information in online social networks. They do not consider the audience that will have access to it or the risk that the information continues to spread and may reach an unexpected audience. Moreover, not all users have the same perception of risk. To overcome these issues, we propose a Privacy Risk Score (PRS) that: (1) estimates the reachability of an user¿s sharing action based on the distance between the user and the potential audience; (2) is described in levels to adjust to the risk perception of individuals; (3) does not require the explicit interaction of individuals since it considers information flows; and (4) can be approximated by centrality metrics for scenarios where there is no access to data about information flows. In this case, if there is access to the network structure, the results show that global metrics such as closeness have a high degree of correlation with PRS. Otherwise, local and social centrality metrics based on ego-networks provide a suitable approximation to PRS. The results in real social networks confirm that local and social centrality metrics based on degree perform well in estimating the privacy risk of users.This work is partially supported by the Spanish Government project TIN2014-55206-R and FPI grant BES-2015-074498.Alemany-Bordera, J.; Del Val Noguera, E.; Alberola Oltra, JM.; García-Fornes, A. (2018). Estimation of privacy risk through centrality metrics. Future Generation Computer Systems. 82:63-76. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.future.2017.12.030S63768

Fired for what you post online?: a self-regulatory perspective on inappropriate online self-presentation

Electronic Thesis or DissertationSocial media offer the ability to communicate simultaneously to a diverse audience. This creates a risk of sharing inappropriate information that may lead to negative consequences. The present research examined whether failures in self-regulation can explain why some individuals share inappropriate information through social media. Study 1 demonstrated that trait self-control predicted disclosure of self-damaging information on social networking profiles. Individuals low in self-control were more likely to report having posted this type of information. Study 2 tested the effectiveness of an ego-depletion manipulation to be utilized in subsequent studies. In Study 3, individuals with depleted regulatory resources were more likely create mock social networking profiles containing potentially damaging information, regardless of their audience (no audience vs. a low risk audience vs. a high risk audience). Study 4 demonstrated that creating a profile to be seen by multiple audiences influenced performance on a subsequent self-regulatory task. Specifically, creating a profile for multiple social networking audiences led to more time spent creating the profile and worse performance on test questions, suggesting that presentation to multiple audiences may consume more regulatory resources. Finally, Study 5 examined whether being depleted (or not) affected how participants think about their social networking audience (i.e., do they narrowly focus on a small set of social networking friends when they are depleted?). Results reveal that this was not the case. Overall, findings indicate that failures in self-regulation may explain to some extent why individuals share inappropriate information via social media

Computer-mediated persuasion: emoticons as a proxy for nonverbal behavior

Electronic Thesis or DissertationThe current research examined whether or not emoticons (in this case, smiley faces) could be used as proxies for nonverbal behavior when inserted into email discussions. Specifically, previous research has suggested that women who are more communal and focused on forming interpersonal bonds may not be able to form such bonds easily when communicating via email due to the lack of nonverbal cues (Guadagno & Cialdini, 2002; 2007). It was predicted that by inserting emoticons into a persuasive email communication, women would be more open to persuasion compared to women who saw no emoticons, whereas we did not expect this to matter for men. A total of 98 (47 men, 51 women) undergraduate students completed the study. Contrary to predictions, results indicated that using a verbal equivalent of the emoticon in an email discussion actually produced more favorability towards the message for both men and women. Additionally, results indicated that individuals' level of femininity predicted attitude towards the topic. Also, the verbal equivalent proxy affected positive mood, which may also help explain the results. Implications for persuasion vial email will be discussed

Social Media and Social Capital: Introduction to the Special Issue

Social media, especially social network sites (SNS) such as Facebook have grown rapidly in popularity in the last ten years. [...