Understanding The Use and Impact of Social Media Features on The Educational Experiences of Higher-Education Students in Blended and Distance-Learning Environments

Students are increasingly expecting social media to be a component of their educational experiences both outside and inside of the classroom. The phenomenon of interest in this dissertation is understanding how the educational experiences of students are affected when social media are incorporated into online and blended course activities. Qualitative case studies are undertaken toward this end from a Human-Computer Interaction perspective by proposing 4 research questions: (1) How does the use of social media in blended-learning courses impact students\u27 educational experience? (2) How does the use of social media in online courses impact students\u27 educational experience? (3) How do specific features of social media impact student experiences inside the physical classroom? (4) How do specific features of social media impact student experiences outside of the physical classroom? This work is rooted in the theoretical foundations of the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework to conceptualize educational experience as defined by the intersection of social, cognitive, and teaching presences. Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) is also integrated here to conceptualize social media features as technical objects defined through the relationship of functional affordances and symbolic expressions between students and social media. The findings are based on a total of 9 case studies (5 within a blended context and 4 within an online context) bound by students in Masters-level library science classes at Syracuse University. The results suggest that social presence is clearly the most salient type of presence in social media within blended course contexts, while cognitive and social presences are relatively salient in social media within online course contexts. Two main categories of affordances, timeliness and information curation, emerged as pertinent to students\u27 educational experiences in blended courses; while both of these, plus multimedia engagement, were identified as relevant to online courses. Technical objects (general features of social media) were identified which facilitate these affordances, and implications based on these are provided in respect to practice (for educators and information technology designers) and theory

Group Maintenance Behaviors in the Decision-Making Styles of Self-Organizing Distributed Teams

Businesses, universities, and other organizations are increasingly reliant on self-organizing, distributed teams which are enabled by information and communication technologies (ICTs). However, inherent geographical, organizational, and social limitations of ICTs challenge the relationships necessary for groups to make effective decisions. Understanding how group maintenance plays out within the context of different styles of decision making may provide insight into social tactics undertaken in such teams. Group maintenance is defined as discretionary, relation-building behavior that enables group members to trust and cooperate with one another more easily [1]. Decision style refers to the extent to which group decision making involves a broad contribution from group members other than leaders. It may range from the most autocratic style where a decision is made by one or a few individuals, to truly collaborative where every member has the opportunity to affect the decision. This study examines group maintenance within decision-making behaviors of Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) development teams as examples of distributed teams. Most FLOSS software is developed by such teams that are both dynamic and self-organizing, comprised of professionals, users, and other volunteers working in a loosely coupled manner [2-4]. These teams are nearly entirely virtual in that developers contribute from around the world, meet face-to-face infrequently (if at all), and coordinate their activities primarily through computer-mediated communications (CMC) [6, 7]

Methods of Measuring Vapor Pressures of Lubricants With Their Additives Using TGA and/or Microbalances

The life of a space system may be critically dependent on the lubrication of some of its moving parts. The vapor pressure, the quantity of the available lubricant, the temperature and the exhaust venting conductance passage are important considerations in the selection and application of a lubricant. In addition, the oil additives employed to provide certain properties of low friction, surface tension, antioxidant and load bearing characteristics, are also very important and need to be known with regard to their amounts and vapor pressures. This paper reports on the measurements and analyses carried out to obtain those parameters for two often employed lubricants, the Apiezon(TM)-C and the Krytox(TM) AB. The measurements were made employing an electronic microbalance and a thermogravimetric analyzer (TGA) modified to operate in a vacuum. The results have been compared to other data on these oils when available. The identification of the mass fractions of the additives in the oil and their vapor pressures as a function of the temperature were carried out. These may be used to estimate the lubricant life given its quantity and the system vent exhaust conductance. It was found that the Apiezon(TM)-C has three main components with different rates of evaporation while the Krytox(TM) did not indicate any measurable additive

Deconstructing Motivations of ICT Adoption and Use: A Theoretical Model and its Application to Social ICT

This paper begins by presenting a case that models of behavioral intention do not provide insight into the core needs of human beings, and as such, cannot inform designers as to what types of ICT features and functions might help meet users??? ICT adoption rationale. We review various motivational concepts across different disciplines. We then present a theoretical model of motivation that encapsulates the process from primitive basic human needs, to the formation and attainment of a specific endstate. We use a real life scenario to show the model???s explanatory power. We end by discussing potential implementations of this model into the study of ICTs

What to Do with Geeks and Nerds? A Collaborative Website Analysis Workshop

Social scientists no longer have to travel far and wide for data on social life, as it is now available at our fingertips on the web. However, many of the techniques normally used in traditional research such as participant-observation and the writing of field notes, need to be adapted quite a bit for use in this new media. Rather than data being expensive and precious, the dilemma becomes how to choose from so much information and how to store and analyze it in meaningful ways that remain acceptable within more traditional fields of study. In this interactive workshop, we will start by introducing our previous work on IT occupational culture, the stereotypes of geeks and nerds, and the potential implications of these stereotypes in the recruiting of people to information technology careers. Taking the topic of geeks and nerds in the IT culture as the topic for our web research, we will describe our experiences on conducting web research by archiving websites using the Mozilla Firefox scrapbook Add-on tool. We will talk about the tool and its features and briefly provide examples of previous research explorations. Then, we will present examples of our research journey on our topic using the scrapbook tool collecting and analyzing data from several websites (commercial sites, blogs, videos) as an experiment to see what we can learn about the culture of geeks and nerds by viewing different types of websites. Finally, as the heart of the workshop, we will have a collective activity of brainstorming, applying, and comparing techniques for webpage analysis, using the topic of geeks and nerds in the IT culture as subject material for discussion. We plan to form multidisciplinary groups from the audience and facilitate a half-hour break-out session to allow the smaller groups to share ideas and summarize their initial findings. The groups will then reunite for a large-group exchange about archiving and analysis of websites about a certain theme. The organizers of this workshop embody a multi-disciplinary approach in all of our work and look forward to the opportunity to forge diverse groups to help analyze the websites from different perspectives and inspire new thinking about possible methods for website analysis

Batch effects in single-cell RNA-sequencing data are corrected by matching mutual nearest neighbors.

Large-scale single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data sets that are produced in different laboratories and at different times contain batch effects that may compromise the integration and interpretation of the data. Existing scRNA-seq analysis methods incorrectly assume that the composition of cell populations is either known or identical across batches. We present a strategy for batch correction based on the detection of mutual nearest neighbors (MNNs) in the high-dimensional expression space. Our approach does not rely on predefined or equal population compositions across batches; instead, it requires only that a subset of the population be shared between batches. We demonstrate the superiority of our approach compared with existing methods by using both simulated and real scRNA-seq data sets. Using multiple droplet-based scRNA-seq data sets, we demonstrate that our MNN batch-effect-correction method can be scaled to large numbers of cells