“Netnography” has been developed for online community researchers. It is “net” plus “ethnography,” which is based on the traditional ethnography and combines with the qualitative analysis for online interactive contents forms of virtual community members. The aim of doing netnographic research is to study the subculture, interactive process and characteristics of collective behaviors of online communities (Kozinets 2009). Follow the development of Internet technology, the web–based method is more convenient and cost–effect in data collection. Members in virtual groups create a large number of interactive texts, pictures, network expressions and other original information over time, which provides an extremely rich database to researchers. Moreover, from the data collection’s point of view, this online observation method will not interfere with the whole research process, which is better than questionnaires and quantitative modeling (Moisander and Valtonen 2006). Additionally, Kozinets (2009) also pointed that netnogrpahy emphasize on the research background, observers not only focus on the text during communications but also need to pay attention to the characteristics of language, history, meaning and communication types. Even parse fonts, symbols, images and photo data. These content of studies are significant in social communication, which is called “Cultural Artifact.” On the other hand, netnography is based on traditional ethnography as a methodology; therefore it inherits the research processes of ethnographic method. Kozients (2009) reinterpreted these procedures for netnography as Firstly, to determine the research target and understand its cultural characteristics; Secondly, to collect and analyze information; Thirdly, to ensure the credibility of interpretation; Fourthly, pay attention to research ethics; Lastly, to obtain respondents feedbacks. To make my research adapting to this guidelines, I make my research process as 1. To target on Plymouth Chinese overseas students and to explain the Chinese guanxi; 2. To collect and analyze data through the existing WeChat group created by Plymouth Chinese Students and Scholars Association (CSSA); 3. To confirm the identity of key influencers in this virtual group; 4. To get feedbacks from respondent as much as possible.
Design Basic Social Media Images Quickly With Pablo
Pablo by Buffer is a no-frills online image editor that lets you make basic social media images in seconds. So while it doesn’t have some of the features of other image editors on this list, it works in a pinch. This tool is free to use without registration, making it perfect for when you or your team needs to create a quick image. My note: not on mobiles yet, only desktop
Design Automatically Resizable Social Media Images With Snappa
Snappa is a user-friendly online image maker that has templates for every social media network. In addition to social post templates, it offers banner, story, and infographic templates. This makes Snappa your one-stop shop for creating all sorts of social media content.
Add Simple Data Visualization Charts to Social Media Images in CanvaCanva is a free online image editor with a huge library of free templates and royalty-free images. The app has built-in templates for all of the major social networks, and you can even post directly to your social media accounts from the app.
Parallel running of two social media from different countries: WeChat and blog for international students
Our work with Chinese students from the Confucius Institute (CI) at St. Cloud State University (SCSU) shed light on an interesting development: in the last several years, the popular Chinese social media platform WeChat dominates the social life of Chinese people, Chinese students in particular.
Based on the WeChat affinity of the Chinese students at the SCSU CI program, the program organizers faced difficulty applying other social media platforms, as part of the curricula of the host country. Namely, blog, as one of the widely used SM platform for creative writing (citation comes here), was contemplated as a SM platform for the Chinese students to journal their experience at the SCSU CI program. Since WeChat behaves rather like Facebook and Snapchat, the lack of opportunity to utilize widely available platform for rather lengthy narration (versus SMS/texting abilitis of Twitter and WeChat) convince the SCSU CI program organizers to seek the buy in by Chinese students into the blog initiative.
Pang (2018) builds a theory based on Ellison (2007) theory of “maintained social capital,” namely the ability of individuals to maintain values of social ties when geographically disconnected. Ping (2018) further narrows her research on Chinese students in Germany using Li and Chen (2014) findings about Ellison’s theory on students in a foreign environment and the necessity for these students to build a new circle of friends in the host country. According to Basilisco an Cha (2015), such environment was provided for Filipino students by using Facebook and Twitter.
Agur, C., Belair-Gagnon, V., & Frish, N. (2018). Mobile sourcing: A case study of journalistic norms and usage of chat apps. Mobile Meida and Communication, 6(1), 53–70. https://doi.org/DOI: 10.1177/2050157917725549
Borgerson, J. L. (2016). Scalable Sociality and 'How the World Changed Social Media': conversation with Daniel Miller. Consumption, Markets & Culture. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10253866.2015.1120980
Chen, Y. (2017). WeChat use among Chinese college students: Exploring gratifications and political engagement in China. Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, 10(1), 25–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2016.1235222
Pang, H. (2016). Understanding key factors affecting young people’s WeChat usage: an empirical study from uses and gratifications perspective. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 12(3), 262. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJWBC.2016.077757
Pang, H. (2018). Understanding the effects of WeChat on perceived social capital and psychological well-being among Chinese international college students in Germany. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 70(3), 288–304. https://doi.org/DOI 10.1108/AJIM-01-2018-0003
Run Zhi Zhu, X. L. X. (2015). The Influence of Social Media on Sleep Quality: A Study of Undergraduate Students in Chongqing, China. Journal of Nursing & Care, 04(03). https://doi.org/10.4172/2167-1168.1000253
Wang, Y., Fang, W.-C., Han, J., & Chen, N.-S. (2016). Exploring the affordances of WeChat for facilitating teaching, social and cognitive presence in semi-synchronous language exchange. Australasian Journal of Educational Technology. https://doi.org/10.14742/ajet.2640
Wei, H., & Ke, L. (2014). “New Weapons” of Ideological and Political Education in Universities—WeChat. SHS Web of Conferences, 6, 04001. https://doi.org/10.1051/shsconf/20140604001
Watkins, S. C. (2009). The Young and the Digital: What the Migration to Social-network Sites, Games, and Anytime, Anywhere Media Means for Our Future. Beacon Press.
p. 1 Digital Migration: young people’s historic move to the online world
p. 8 broadband adoption in 2005-6. p. 9 before broadband, Internet was more textual then visual. p. 11 broadband more then just expand technical capabilities paved the way for profund behavioral shifts and social transformation
Broadband did not create radically new online activities. But expand a relatively small collection of early adopting technophiles into a massive but highly differentiated public of netizens, world builders, blogger, gamers, social networkers, content creators
p. 19 Social Media 101 what schools are learning about themselves and young technology users.
p. 20 DOPA (the Delete Online Predators Act), p. 21 brought the elimination of most interactive web applications from public schools and libraries. Social-Web enthusiasts strongly opposed DOPA. ALA also.
p. 24 MacArthur Foundation’s white paper: Living and Learning with New Media”
p. 30 NTIA National Telecommunications and Information Administration
p. 36 mother allowed her teenage daughter to use Facebook. The one caveat: the mother would be able to access her daughter’s profile. A common practice. A mother of a fifteen year old boy who recently started using FB occasionally looks at his page. 2007 Pew writes that “41% of today’s teens believe that their parents monitor them after they’ve gone online.” This is not unusual.
p. 41 schools cannot punish for what happened at home. But what about what happened online? Referring to social media: when kids get into disagreements via FB, it often spills over into the schools.
p. 44 sexting.
p. 47 the very well connected: friending, bonding and community in the digital age
p. 52 Malcolm Wiley and Stuart Rice 1933 argued that technology such as the automobile and telephone hastened the unraveling of the social fabric of the American life.
p. 72 phatic exchanges. Vetere, Howward and Gibbs. Brief but sencere. Katz James E and Mark Aakhus call “perpetual contact.”
p. 75 Digital Gates
How race and class distinctions are shaping the digital world
dana boyd 2007 article “Viewing American Class Divisions through FB and MySpace.”
p. 77 Hargittai Facebook is more white then MySpace.
p. 99 television and social network sites represent two fundamentally different kinds of mediated experiences. Whereas television is about watching and consuming, SNS are primarily about doing and sharing.
p. 100 Paul Eastwick and Wendi Gardner There.com – the virtual world may not prove to be a perfect utopian gateway from the real world.
p. 103 We Play: the allure of social games, synthetic worlds and secnd lives.
p. 106 a growing number of young men are turning to interactive entertainment like games rather than television and movies as their first source for leisure and a desired choice for social interaction with their friends.
p. 131 heavy users of virtual worlds differ from the 68% of young people, who believe that online-only relationships can be as fulfilling as off-line relationships. Synthetic world users are much more likely to believe that online relationships can be just as fulfilling as off-line relationships.
p. 133 Hooked Rethinking the Internet addition debate
p. 134 valid mental disorder. Journal of American Psychiatry 2007 – Internet Addiction Disorder (IAD) for DSM-IV. P. 136 some of the problems researchers
Whether your school or district has officially adopted social media or not, conversations are happening in and around your school on everything from Facebook to Snapchat. Schools must reckon with this reality and commit to supporting thoughtful and critical social media use among students, teachers and administrators. If not, schools and classrooms risk everything from digital distraction to privacy violations.
Key Elements to Include in a Social Media Policy
Create parent opt-out forms that specifically address social media use.Avoid blanket opt-outs that generalize all technology or obfuscate how specific social media platforms will be used. (See this example by the World Privacy Forum as a starting point.)
Use these opt-out forms as a way to have more substantive conversations with parents about what you’re doing and why.
Describe what platforms are being used, where, when and how.
Avoid making the consequences of opt-out selections punitive (e.g., student participation in sports, theater, yearbook, etc.).
Restrict location sharing: Train teachers and students on how to turn off geolocation features/location services on devices as well as in specific apps.
Minimize information shared in teacher’s social media profiles: Advise teachers to list only grade level and subject in their public profiles and not to include specific school or district information.
Make social media use transparent to students: Have teachers explain their social media plan, and find out how students feel about it.
Most important: As with any technology, attach social media use to clearly articulated goals for student learning. Emphasize in your guidelines that teachers should audit any potential use of social media in terms of student-centered pedagogy: (1) Does it forward student learning in a way impossible through other means? and (2) Is using social media in my best interests or in my students’?
Moving from Policy to Practice.
Social media policies, like policies in general, are meant to mitigate the risk and liability of institutions rather than guide and support sound pedagogy and student learning. They serve a valuable purpose, but not one that impacts classrooms. So how do we make these policies more relevant to classrooms?
First, it forces policy to get distilled into what impacts classroom instruction and administration. Second, social media changes monthly, and it’s much easier to update a faculty handbook than a policy document. Third, it allows you to align social media issues with other aspects of teaching (assessment, parent communication, etc.) versus separating it out in its own section.
the standard set of middle-class Democratic Party values: Public safety nets were a force for good, corporate greed was a real threat, civil and reproductive rights were paramount.
I remember how good it felt to stand with my friends in our matching college sweatshirts shouting “never again!” and “my body, my choice!”
We would all go to the mat for women’s rights, gay rights, or pretty much any rights other than gun rights. We lived, for the most part, in big cities in blue states.
When Barack Obama came into the picture, we loved him with the delirium of crushed-out teenagers, perhaps less for his policies than for being the kind of person who also listens to NPR. We loved Hillary Clinton with the fraught resignation of a daughter’s love for her mother. We loved her even if we didn’t like her. We were liberals, after all. We were family.
Words like “mansplaining” and “gaslighting” were suddenly in heavy rotation, often invoked with such elasticity as to render them nearly meaningless. Similarly, the term “woke,” which originated in black activism, was being now used to draw a bright line between those on the right side of things and those on the wrong side of things.
From the Black Guys on Bloggingheads, YouTube’s algorithms bounced me along a path of similarly unapologetic thought criminals: the neuroscientist Sam Harris and his Waking Up podcast; Christina Hoff Sommers, aka “The Factual Feminist”; the comedian turned YouTube interviewer Dave Rubin; the counter-extremist activist Maajid Nawaz; and a cantankerous and then little-known Canadian psychology professor named Jordan Peterson, who railed against authoritarianism on both the left and right but reserved special disdain for postmodernism, which he believed was eroding rational thought on campuses and elsewhere.
the sudden national obsession with female endangerment on college campuses struck me much the same way it had in the early 1990s: well-intended but ultimately infantilizing to women and essentially unfeminist.
Weinstein and his wife, the evolutionary biologist Heather Heying, who also taught at Evergreen, would eventually leave the school and go on to become core members of the “intellectual dark web.”
Weinstein talked about intellectual “feebleness” in academia and in the media, about the demise of nuance, about still considering himself a progressive despite his feeling that the far left was no better at offering practical solutions to the world’s problems than the far right.
an American Enterprise Institute video of Sommers, the Factual Feminist, in conversation with the scholar and social critic Camille Paglia — “My generation fought for the freedom for women to risk getting raped!” I watched yet another video in which Paglia sat by herself and expounded volcanically about the patriarchal history of art (she was all for it).
James Baldwin’s line, “I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually
Jordan Peterson Twelve Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos, is a sort of New and Improved Testament for the purpose-lacking young person (often but not always male) for whom tough-love directives like “clean up your room!” go down a lot easier when dispensed with a Jungian, evo-psych panache.
Quillette, a new online magazine that billed itself as “a platform for free thought”
the more honest we are about what we think, the more we’re alone with our thoughts. Just as you can’t fight Trumpism with tribalism, you can’t fight tribalism with a tribe.
distributed computing + power encryption = the future of Internet
the Dark Net is going mainstream, liberty, freedom, democracy; neither entirely dark, not entirely light, both things
The threat that tech monopolies pose to democracies is about more than the prices they charge: it’s the concentration of power, data and control over the public space — and their ability to wield this power over a growing number of economic activities, especially in the infrastructure and technologies of the future. The following companies operate as either monopolies or oligopolies in their respective fields: Google, Facebook, Uber, Airbnb, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram, Spotify. Integrated into everything, everywhere, their technology will blanket the world.
cultural hegemony.” That is, where domination can be achieved through controlling the ideas and assumptions available to the public. The idea, associated with philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci
In 1995, left-wing academics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron detailed the philosophy and ideas of the new tech wunderkinds, christening it “The Californian Ideology.” This ideology represented a fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco and entrepreneurial free market zeal.
All you needed to get to utopia was a belief in “disruption,” the idea that progress is achieved through smashing up old industries and institutions and replacing them with something new and digital.
Money and ideas in Silicon Valley have a very complicated relationship. Silicon Valley runs according to a Faustian pact: money in exchange for world-changing ideas.
Over the years, the big tech firms have very carefully cultivated the Californian Ideology. Even though they are massive multi-billion-dollar corporations with huge PR teams, they pitch themselves as anti-establishment.The worse these companies behave and the richer they become, the more they spend on looking cool and talking about fairness and community.
And to whom do we look in order to solve our collective social problems? It’s no longer the state, but the modern tech-geek superhero.
Total victory for the monopoly is not over economics or politics. It’s over assumptions, ideas and possible futures.
Tired of hearing all the reasons why you should be using Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and other popular social media tools? Perhaps it’s time to explore social media tools in a supportive and engaging environment with a keen eye toward using those tools more effectively in your work.
Join us and social media guru and innovator Paul Signorelli in this four-week, highly-interactive eCourse as he explores a variety of social media tools in terms of how they can be used to organize information and communities. Together, you will survey and use a variety of social media tools, such as Delicious, Diigo, Facebook, Goodreads, Google Hangouts, LibraryThing, Pinterest, Twitter, and more! You will also explore how social media tools can be used to organize and disseminate information and how they can be used to foster and sustain communities of learning.
After participating in this eCourse, you will have an:
Awareness of how social media tools can be used to support the work you do with colleagues and other community stakeholders in fostering engagement through onsite and online communities
Increased ability to identify, explore, and foster the use of social media tools that support you and those you serve
Increased ability to use a variety of social media tools effectively in your day-to-day work
Part 1: Using Social Media Tools to Organize and Provide Access to Information
Delicious, Diigo, Goodreads, LibraryThing, and other tagging sites
Part 2: Organizing, Marketing, and Running Programs
Facebook, Pinterest, and other tools for engagement
Part 3: Expanding and Analyzing Community Impact
Twitter, Storify, and other microblogging resources
Part 4: Sustaining Engagement with Community Partners
Coordinating your presence and interactions across a variety of social media tools
trainer-instructional designer-presenter-consultant. Much of his work involves fostering community and collaboration face-to-face and online through libraries, other learning organizations, and large-scale community-based projects including San Francisco’s Hidden Garden Steps project, which has its origins in a conversation that took place within a local branch library. He remains active on New Media Consortium Horizon Report advisory boards/expert panels, in the Association for Talent Development (ATD–formerly the American Society for Training & Development), and with the American Library Association; adores blended learning; and remains a firm advocate of developing sustainable onsite and online community partnerships that meet all partners’ needs. He is co-author of Workplace Learning & Leadership with Lori Reed and author of the upcoming Change the World Using Social Media (Rowman & Littlefield, Autumn 2018).