The education world is scrambling to catch up with the implications of today’s ubiquitous, social media environment. We’re familiar with stories about teacher firings and cyber-bullying. The latest dustup has been the recent legislation in Missouri that forbids teachers from having any private interaction with students online. This means no friend-connections on Facebook or private messages between students and teachers. All interaction must occur publicly. Of course, there’s been huge push-back and uproar to this shortsighted policy and many such controversies are sure to come in the education world as we deal with new media. But how can we as education leaders think about these policy issues?
Author Archives: JuneA
Who Owns my Online Self? And why should I care?
As people flock to test out Google+, I’ve been following the excited chatter and started testing it out myself. However, this experience has really been difficult for me and has brought up real personal questions of whether I can invest in yet another network. How can someone who studies this stuff for a living have such a hard time?!?! It has to do with a deep human desire for self and ownership that I think current networking tools do not yet consider.
Presentations at HCIL and MIMAUE
Had the opportunity to give two talks this spring about my research on youth and social network sites. The first was at the Maryland Institute for Minority Achievement and Urban Education (check them out here). The second was at the Annual Symposium for the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), one of the oldest HCI labs in the world (check them out here). The Symposium was an amazing experience and I’m happy to be a part of the great research community there.
Dissertation of the Year Award
I’m happy to share that I recently received the PhD Dissertation of the Year award at my alma mater, University of Southern California (Rossier School of Education). The school was gracious enough to pay for my trip back to SoCal, where I attended the commencement ceremonies and received the award. My dissertation examined the use of social network sites by high school youths, and I’m excited to potentially share my work as it comes out in various venues in the near future.
Students, SNSs, and Social Capital
My first year as an Assistant Professor has been a whirlwind; moving to a new place, adjusting to a new institution, and finding my way. Luckily I’ve had a tremendous amount of data from my dissertation to keep me occupied on the research front. My dissertation consisted of an experimental study of the effects of using a social network site in high school classrooms. I’m in the process of preparing a manuscript for review in a journal, but I thought I’d share some of the results.
Interestingly, the SNS used in the high schools I worked with had a slightly negative effect on how connect the students felt to their peers in school. However, I also surveyed the students on their use of other popular sites like Facebook and Myspace. The result? Students who actively used other SNSs reported much higher connection to their peers in school. What does this mean for educators? I think there are positive and unexplored possibilities of using social media tools to better engage students to their school community. This type of engagement is not about learning specific content… but being connected, or having more social capital, is often related to positive outcomes in school such as students persisting to graduation and achieving higher. Could we use SNSs to better connect young people to school?
Social Network Sites and Youth: Paper Published in JASIST
I recently had a paper accepted and published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST). The article appears in their Advances in Information Sciences series, and is a review of the critical questions that surround youths participation in social network sites. How do they use them? What are the hypothesized effects on youth relationships, psychological well-being, and learning? These are some of the issues I consider in the article. You can find the article here, or feel free to contact me and I would be happy to share the article with you.
RASA Research Grant
I received a Research and Scholarship Award (RASA) from the University of Maryland this year. This seed grant will provide funds for me to conduct a study this coming summer on designing social interdependence mechanisms that may promote better collaborative learning in networked, online environments. I’m honored to receive the award and excited to conduct the study this summer!
SPARC Research Grant
I’m happy to share that I received a SPARC grant from the University of Maryland, College Park (College of Education). This seed grant is geared towards early career faculty to conduct initial research studies and jumpstart their activities. My project will qualitatively examine the Facebook activity of high school youth to determine the types of learning and social behaviors that occur in this online community.