How Many People Do you Have in your Networks? Reflections on the readings

As Rainie and Wellman (2012) claimed, average Americans now have an estimated six hundred people in their networks. The number sounds so crazy. How can we handle our relationship with so many people?

Reflect on my own experience. I have 4 family members, and around 40 close relatives in my father and mother' line. I have had lots of classmates in my elementary schools, secondary schools, and universities. In addition to my classmates, I also make some friends face-to-face or online who share some common interests with me. Moreover, I am in an interdisciplinary research group, and know students in other programs. I also have lots of friends on Facebook, Twitter, Google plus, and Linkedin. As this number of connected people continue, I think I have six hundred people in my network, too.

Regarding how to handle our relationship with those people, I follow the Golden Rule that help will be there when needed. As Rainie and Wellman (2012) found, we can easily navigate our personal networks to get the aid and comfort we need in a certain situation. We can get information, support, and advice from more— and more diversified— sources. When I need assistance in paper, I turn directly to my advisor or students in my program for help. When I need assistance in assignment, I discuss with my classmates. When I feel sad or frustrates, I chat with my best friends to get emotional support. Another reason for contributing to my capacity in balancing my networks is my media-literacy. Majoring in Educational technology, I have known clearly how to find information, assess it, react to it, and even remix it by using different web 2.0 tools.

However, I rarely think about managing my personal brand. I am always so naive that I do not need to manage my fame since I am nobody now. According to the Pew Internet survey, 57 percent of American internet users had searched for material about themselves online, 33 percent of internet users worried about how much information is available about them, and 8 percent had asked other users to remove information about them  (Rainie & Wellman, 2012). I did search for information about myself at all. I did not worry about what information was available about me. But this survey result reminds me of that I should take care of information about me out there on the search engine. The first step I will take is setting up the email alerts and syndicated news feeds when my name is mentioned on news or other prominent sites.The second step I will take is reviewing and cleaning up my posts on Facebook and WeChat, I will delete some negative stuff that I do not want my family members see because my father will be my WeChat friend.

Rainie, L., &Wellman, B. (2012-04-27). Networked: The New Social Operating System. The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

Celebrity's Leaked or hacked Photos Violates their Privacy or Not?

The privacy issue is very tricky for celebrities. Does celebrities have a right to privacy?  According to the data, 33% said “No” and claimed “They signed a contract which basically gave the media the right to see their private lives. They make the majority of their money of their money off the public press. They are also paid so people can see their private lives. All in all they don’t deserve privacy at all.” Those who agreed with celebrities’ privacy claimed “Celebrities are also human like us. Like we want our privacy be safe, they want their privacy be safe. It's unfair when their privacy is show in public just because they are living in the pblic spotlight. ” I agree with most of people that they still have a right to privacy.

However, in the digital age, it's so hard for celebrities to protect their privacy.  It's so easy for hackers and the public to search the information about a celebrity.

I think all of you must know about the 2014 celebrity photo hack on August 31, 2014, a collection of almost 500 private pictures of various celebrities, mostly women, and with many containing nudity, were posted on the imageboard 4chan, and later disseminated by other users on websites and social networks such as Imgur, Reddit and Tumblr. 

The photo hack ruined many celebrities’ fame and life. I think those hackers badly violated those celebrities’ privacy. Even though those celebrities should be exposed to flashlight all the time, and reveal their private life in some situations, their privacy need to be protected. For them, exposing to the flashlight is sort of work. They also need to separate their life and work. 

In addition to hacked celebrity photos, their leaked photos also cause them into lots of trouble. Take a movie star in China for example. Since her private photos were leaked to the public, her career was destroyed, and she was criticized by the public. She is not popular any more.  

So I am thinking as a celebrity, what the line between violating their privacy and revealing their profile at an appropriate level? Unlike us, celebrities’ profile is easily searchable. Everyone with the internet can access to them. Then what about the information they want to hide from the public? This makes me think about that another female movie star lied about her age. After her real age was revealed, some of her fans turned back to her, and claimed “she is a liar”. However, I think the age should be privacy, right? It makes sense if they hide their age. 

How much does resume design matter to you? A tool called Vizualize can help you.

I was exploring the tool Vizualize which can be used to design a nice resume. Then I came across an interesting article about how much resume matter to the HR people. Quote from the comments to this article "The formatting on a resume tells me a lot about a person, almost as much as the resume itself." I actually felt surprised at this point.

To be honest, I do not have lots of experiences in editing my resumes to find a job. I still remember when I applied for FSU, I did not make a fancy resume. My resume was a little ugly with lots of words without picture or good structure. About this issue, I am thinking how much it is different between a resume for applying for a graduate program at an institution and applying for a job in a company. According to my knowledge, the resume for applying for a graduate program should look very professional and formal without pictures. The resume for a company can be more attracting by adding visual design.

What citation management software do you often use? Share with me here

Recently, I talked with my advisor about what citation software we should use.

She recommended the Endnote. I have tried it for several days. It is indeed convenient to manage our citations. However, we can only use it for free for 30 free-trial days. Then we will need to pay for it to add more citations.

The RefWorks embedded in FSU libraries is not a free software, either. But if you only want to manage your citation during your graduate study, you can definitely use the RefWorks to manage all your citations to complete your thesis or paper. Here is the link https://www.lib.fsu.edu/eresource/refworks. After you graduate, you can export all your collections of references to other bibliographic software like Zoteto which is free.

Of course, we can use Google Scholar to save citations for all articles we searched on Google scholar. But the problem is that sometimes we do not use it for searching for some articles. So Google Scholar is not convenient for managing our citations.

For me, I am now using Evernote to organize all citations I am interested. I always create a note in which I write down some reflections on articles I am interested and add reference lists at the bottom. But I realize it is not enough to manage a large amount of citations which we are interested. For example, when we read an article, we may find the reference list for it can be useful for us. It will be good to find citation manager tool to export those citations directly for us.

Here is a comparison of different citationmange software, based on which you can decide which software you can choose from to manage your citation. By the way, I will plan to use Zotero more frequently because it's free. I once used Zotero, and then stopped. And I actually do not know about other citation management tools.

What citation management software do you often use? Share with me here.

Continue my reflection of the application of Facebook in higher education

I have already read my classmates' thoughts against the application of Facebook in higher education. I must say they all make their own points. I want to especially address some issues here

Should higher education instructors and students be connected to each other on social media systems such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn? How should they manage friendship requests? What 
action(s) should be taken when the virtual aspect of the instructor-­‐student relationship becomes uncomfortable?

According to Dennen and Burner (2014), students do not want to be friends with instructors because they want to maintain their privacy, feel  inappropriate, and not in peer group. I agree with these three reasons. I was there as an undergraduate student. When I was a college student, I did not add my instructors as my friends because I was afraid of them. I did not know how to interact with them. As Dennen and Burner (2014) found, students need to censor content they put on their page if they are friends with their instructors. I agree with this. When I realized my instructors may read my messages, I became very cautious about what I should post online. However, as time goes by, I did not think like this anymore. I actively added one of my instructors to my WeChat group because I wanted to talk with her, and know what was happening to her. We were having a great relationship. Why should we stop connecting with each other? After graduation, undergraduate will know their instructors are just like them, not so special. After graduation, they do not need to talk with their instructors about professional stuff. They may talk about some common hobbies or sharing travel experiences.

Let's look at reasons to be friends with instructors which include learning more about them, interacting socially, professional networking, Actually, I requested friendship with my instructors based on the three reasons. At the beginning, I feel nervous when posting my status because I am worried that I make some grammatical errors. Now, I feel pretty OK with posting appropriate messages even though I know my instructors will see them. I think I will be totally OK even when my instructor tell me I make mistake at some places because we always learn from mistakes. I want to build a wonderful relationship with my instructors.  As Mazer, Murphy, & Simonds argued, disclosing more personal information via Facebook led to  higher levels of trustworthiness and caring from students to those instructors (as cited in Dennen & Burner, 2013, October). Students may feel free to talk about some issues on Facebook. Those issues can be not course-related. In other words, friends with teachers on Facebook offer another way for them to communicate with each other, and broaden topics they can talk about.

In a nutshell, I think that instructors and students should be connected to each other on Facebook to enhance mutual understanding of each other. For me, I am now connected with my instructors on these three social media. I do feel nothing is wrong. For me, it's interesting to see on Facebook what is happening in my instructors' work or life even though most of time I only like and share their posts instead of leaving a comment to their post. As an international student, it's always necessary and interesting to observe American faculty's life if they is OK with that. I will consider it as necessary for experiencing different cultures.

References

Dennen, V., & Burner, K. (2013, October). Friending and Footprints: Privacy and Ethical Issues of Facebook Use in Higher Education. In World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare, and Higher Education (Vol. 2013, No. 1, pp. 642-648). 

Dennen, V. P., & Burner, K. J. (2014). FACEBOOK, “FRIENDS,” AND THE HIGHER EDUCATION CLASSROOM: STUDENT PREFERENCES AND ATTITUDES. Selected Papers of Internet Research, 4.

Dog knows meme? Human has selfish meme?

Here is a funny meme center. http://www.memecenter.com/ . You can check it out.
Thank V for talking about MEME stuff in the blog meme-no-me-me.html. I found this meme center, and found lots of funny pictures.
One I like most is about a dog who does not trust anyone. He is so genius that he considers his paw as enemy to steal the food from him. That's funny.  Check it out. genius-dog-knows-meme

This is a another one.  A big gift for a cat. This makes me laugh. The cat is so cute!

The above is about funny stuff. 
I just found this article the-selfish-meme which is concerned with our selfish meme: we always want to share our thoughts. According to the author, when we share our feeling or thoughts on the social media, we activate our brain reward system and feel satisfied. Based on my experiences, I think posting my thoughts online is indeed making me happy in some ways. When I feel so frustrated or surprising, exciting about something, I feel eager to share with others. I guess others' likes, replies, or retweeting of my tweets are rewarding to me. 

When do you feel eager to share with someone else? 

Does Chinese Internet Censorship Really Work Out?

"According to the latest statistics from China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC), an administrative body under the Ministry of Information Industry, China currently has 618 million Internet users and 281 million use popular microblogging sites known collectively as Weibo" (Ng, 2014). "In a 2013 study of social media site Sina Weibo, researchers at Northeastern University found empirical evidence that censorship sometimes not only fails to quash discussion of sensitive topics on Chinese social media sites, but may even encourage it. Though numerous factors may be at play, the finding reinforces the popular notion that attempts to conceal information can backfire and even become a central part of a story—a phenomenon known as the Streisand Effect" (Ng, 2014). According to Ng (2014), "one should not underestimate the ability of Chinese Internet users to dig up information authorities are trying to hide—especially when it directly affects them or when it relates to righting injustices. But one must also acknowledge that China’s censors often still have the will and the tools to manage online information effectively to suit the government’s need".  

So it is clear that even though CNNIC wants to censor voices on social media, it seems not to work out sometimes. According to my own experiences, online discussions about information which is hided by authorities are always quickly missing in one day. I know clearly that CNNIC sometimes work very efficiently to censor contents online to avoid the harm to the public. The well-known great wall prevents us from using Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and google services to make sure that CNNIC is able to control our voices and speaking. However, we have already managed to have access to Facebook, Twitter, or Youtube in some ways. Even though some authorities are hiding information, several days later, or months later, the information came out eventually. As an old saying goes, “The best way to hide a misdeed is not to commit it".

In a nutshell, Chinese Internet censorship seems to work out sometimes, but it does not eventually due to the Chinese people' pursuit of the truth.


References

Ng, J.Q. (2014, March 17). How Chinese Internet Censorship Works, Sometimes. ChinaFile. Retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/17/china-internet-censorship_n_4981389.html

The Merits and Risks of Using Twitter for Professional Learning and Relationship Building?

Recently, I came up on two many conversations about the application of Twitter to support students' professional learning and language learning. So I want to explore more about the merits and risks of using Twitter for the two purposes.

As Dennen (2011) found, Twitter could be used to seek specific information about conference, and promote talks about all kinds of stuff about the conference thus enabling professional learning beyond the conference room. However, they found the potential downside of the application of Twitter was the sporadic and at times cryptic posting of useful information make people who did not take the conference at a lost and had no clues about what was going on. I think one reason is that Twitter has the limitation of 140 words. 140 words make most of tweets lose the background information. Dennen (2011) also found that people from different fields might post different types and number of tweets. For those fields like computer science, information studies, most people are early adopters of Twitter technology. I think different stages of adoption of technology greatly affect people engagement in Twitter-based professional discourse. Another downside of the application of Twitter interaction is that a large percentage of tweets are replies and retweets instead of constructive replies because most participants are not familiar with each other.
By summarizing Dennen (2011)'s study, we can see that Twitter can support us to engage in professional conversations with followers under a certain hashtag. However, the limitation in words make it not easy to pass complete thoughts or ideas to others by tweets.  Also, for some people, they are not getting used to the application of Twitter on academic or profession purpose. Another downside of twitter is that when followers for a hashtag are not familiar with each other, they do not often engage in deep conversations with others.

Taking my own experience in the course for example. At the beginning, I actively engaged in Twitter because I had something to share with. During these two weeks, I kind of left behind the twitter conversations because I did not have time to check updated tweets and share my ideas. I guess the time is also a big factor affecting students' engagement in Twitter-based conversations.

You can also go to this website, and check the pros and cons of Using Twitter. http://www.grosocial.com/blog/pros-and-cons-of-twitter/ I echoed with the following point.

• Twitter is busy. Twitter users generate 340 million tweets per day, and most users follow several hundred profiles. Because there is no Edgerank, if you only tweet once or twice a day, your tweets are quickly buried in your followers’ feeds.

  This is true. When you post a tweet and wait for someone to respond to you, your tweets are buried in your followers' feeds. This makes participating in a certain hashtag or handle a good choice to take to engage in dialogue with followers who share the same research interest with you.

I remember Michelle posted a question in discussion board: would it be better to use email instead than Twitter when we engage in a quite daily-life conversation with one person? I totally agree. Most of us have been used to sending email at a fingertip. Why do we bother using Twitter when we want to talk about kind of private life or topic with others.?

All in all, I think we should think thoroughly about using Twitter to support professional learning.

What types of reflection do we need? Group reflection, instructor-supported reflection, and self-reflection?

Since the readings in this week are my interest, I would like to reflect on those readings.  According to Kim, Hong, Bonk, and Lim (2011)'s experimental study, instructor-supported reflection led to better performance, and team effectiveness. Their result was consistent with previous studies. Based on my experiences, I think that makes lots of sense. A group members could not build a mutual trust during a short time period, and thus need instructors' feedback.  Instructors should monitor and take part in their learning process, make suggestions, references, or resources related to their project to learners, replies to student emails, and grade work with comments. Teachers' feedback let students feel that they are not alone. Even though team members do not collaborate very well with each other, they can hang there with teachers' guidance or even interventions.

Regarding group reflection, the study showed that actually team effectiveness was improved towards the ending of the experiment. This also made sense. At the beginning of the teamwork, members may not be familiar with each other. Thus they do not know how to interact with each other, and what words should be used. You know, individuals have different preferences. For example, my preference is that I am almost offline at weekends, and choosing reading articles and papers. However, in one team project I was working on, my team members still worked at weekends because of the deadline. So I did not respond to them immediately via email. As I think back, I feel sorry for them. But I indeed actively participate in the group project. But I can feel they feel not so safe when failing in receiving my email immediately. So when working in a team, knowing individual preferences in the schedule, learning characteristic is very important.  As time goes by, team members can gradually know better about each other. At this point, they can collaborate with each other more smoothly. As Kim et al. (2011) found, team members felt a burden when critically evaluating others’ performance. But I think if every member in a team try their best to make contributions to the team work, they won’t feel awkward at all. I remember I made good friends with my team members in a team project. We actually kept weekly meeting even after the class project. When giving peer feedback, I did not feel nervous at all because they were all great team members.

As self-reflection is concerned, I think it is hard to do, but more deeply. Even though the study did not reveal the importance of self-reflection, I do think it is very helpful to improve our critical thinking and knowledge base. Personally speaking, knowledge can only be taken after the application and reflection. For example, after I read the article, I could not connect the knowledge and studies with my previous knowledge base and cognition until I made reflections on it in this blog. Also, I like reading others’ deep reflection blog, which make me learn about unfamiliar topics and experiences. I think individuals have their own wisdom and ways of thinking. We can always learn from others’ deep reflection on their experiences or perceptions.  

The above are my thoughts. Look forward to your feedback. Lol. 

Kim, P., Hong, J., Bonk, C., & Lim, G (2011): Effects of group reflection variations in project-based learning integrated in a Web 2.0 learning space, Interactive Learning Environments, 19(4), 333-349. doi:10.1080/10494820903210782

How’s CampusPress different than Edublogs?

Refer to this webpage: http://edublogs.org/2014/03/04/campuspress-wordpress-for-education/

Different from edublog, the CampusPress is dedicated network for schools & universities! Schools and universities need to pay for it.  

There are two better features provided by CampusPress are as follows:

• a dedicated WordPress Multisite network at a branded domain, like sites.myschool.edu
• unlimited sites, users, traffic, and storage

With the two features, every school, department, and program can create their own pages where students and teachers can share news, valuable resources, and engage in conversations with educators from all over the world. 

By exploring more on the CampusPress, I find that as super administrator, you can enable Google Analytics to track visitor data across all of the blogs in your CampusPress  network. This is very powerful. You can check it out via http://www.campuspress.com/docs/general-settings/creating-a-network-google-analytics-account/

How can we use Twitter to support a community of practice (CoP) changing practice?

To be honest, I think a CoP is necessary condition for professional learning and knowledge growth.  CoP refers to the relations between community members: mutual engagement, a shared repertoire and joint enterprise (Wenger, 1998). As the definition suggest, in a CoP, members often engage in sharing their knowledge, understanding, and ideas to achieve a common goal.  Based on my personal experience, I think engaging in a community of practice is a perfect way to improve our knowledge and skills. I still remember how little I know about the research, work ethics, study norms, and life in this program. By engaging in all kinds of social events, research mix, research team meeting with other students in one research group, and group projects, I grow my knowledge about the research, work ethics, study norms, and life in this program, and then my love in this program. Now I know very well who share the same or similar research interest with me, who have a different interest, and what scholar practices I need to participate in. For example, I know I should try to present my paper at AECT or AERA, or other related conference, and then write and publish my paper. 

Speaking of the application of social media in supporting CoP, I am thinking about integrating necessary social media tools to support my CoP in a specific research group.  Of course, Twitter, Facebook, Diigo, and Youtube would be included.

Social media like Twitter can offer a virtual space for improving our knowledge, skills, and practices in a community. As Goodyear, Casey and Kirk 2014) found, the tweets, RTs and likes could reinforce teachers’ good changing practice by passing a message “you are doing the right thing”, which developing the trust between members. I think the trust built on those tweets, RTs and likes was more important. Since community members trust in other members, they felt comfortable in sharing their feelings, attitudes, knowledge and real practices. With trust, community members felt that their tweets were valued, meaningful to others. Thus, they would rather share more about themselves and practices by Twitter.

For some members who were very active, they portrayed themselves in a new identity as star performers (Goodyear, Casey & Kirk 2014), thus promoting their engagement in Twitter-based communication. For these members, they were motivated by their high self-efficacy. When they felt confident in doing something, they would rather continuing doing that. Also, it is important to have a leader in Twitter-based communication.  In the study case, Vitoria played a big role in answering members’ questions, modeling twitter-based communication and good practices, promoting the communication between members by retweeting, likes and encouraging face-to-face talk without her. Even though Victoria as a leader for the Twitter-based conversation, she was just a facilitator for a project for a short time. The engagement of the real leader in the department was more important. By creating an account to support teachers’ changing practice, the real leader passed a message “we are together doing something right”.  This eventually signifying the CoP in a Twitter environment. I think, at this point, Twitter was not a simple communication tool. Instead, it was an online CoP.

Goodyear, V. A., Casey, A., & Kirk, D. (2014): Tweet me, message me, like me: using social media to facilitate pedagogical change within an emerging community of practice, Sport, Education and Society, 19(7), 927-943. doi: 10.1080/13573322.2013.858624

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice; learning, meaning and identity. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Quora: a collection of questions and answers. I like it!

Thank our teacher for sharing this tool: http://www.quora.com/

I think this quora tool is a good one to help us to find answers we want.  I have already registered for this website, and chose all the topics that I am interested. Personally speaking, I think nowadays, proposing a valuable question is even more important than answering a question. You know, before we extend our knowledge by exploring more resources, we do not even know what we do not know. The more you learn, the more you realize how little you know.  So it’s good of Quora to offer a platform to collect all questions in various areas. For example, I chose the topic about education and technology. I am wondering what questions others hold about these two questions.  Another thing attract me of this tool is that I can see how they express their questions related to some topics I am interested.  Quora makes sure that all the questions are of quality. Otherwise, it won’t take it. That’s a blessing for me. My written English is not good enough. I need to learn from others about how I can express my ideas and thoughts appropriately. Also, I can learn a lot from answers from professionals. On this website, it also allows you to rate the questions and answers. The rating would help people to identify which questions are valuable and most popular.  

In the near future, I will explore lots of questions related to my interest: online learning in Quora. I highly recommend you explore this tool, and share with me about your feelings.  

The following is a screenshot of what I got when searched for a topic about MOOCs. I found lots of valuable resources. 

After going through this question, I would clear know what questions are most proposed regarding MOOCs. 

  

What guidance should be given to students for their web 2.0 assignments?

Gray et al (2012) found teachers have encountered too main challenges towards assessment of web 2.0 assignments. In the last blog post, I mainly discussed about the second challenge: how to evaluate students' evaluation. In this blog, I will focus on what guidance students should receive for the Web 2.0 assignments. 

What guidance should be given to students for their web 2.0 assignments? 

 Teachers are worried about that what guidance they should offer students. They are worried that too much guidance would put constraints on students' thinking. But inadequate guidance may let students get lost and feel frustrated (Gray et al, 2012).  I think they should work together with their tutors, or assistants to give clear guidance for students during the whole process of web 2.0 assignments.

Before they work on the assignments, teachers need to offer clear criteria for the web 2.0 assignments. and also prepare students for a new form of assignments.

As with the criteria, different levels of study, and potential diverse content types make it hard to establish a clear and fixed criteria (Gray et al, 2012). But I think it is necessary and doable to offer clear criteria for web 2.0 assignments. Take one assignment based on blogger for example. In the criteria, teachers can make it clear that students need to finish the minimum requirement: writing at least 4 blogs reflecting on what we have learned in this weekin a week (borrowing ideas from V), making at least 4 comments on classmates, reading at least 8 blogs. As long as they finish the minimum requirement, they feel free to post more blogs. I think the minimum requirement works effectively in web 2.0 assignments and traditional assignments. Students always need to know what they should finish. I know web 2.0 tools should enable students to express freely. But as long as they are applied in educational environments, clear learning objectives should be attached to the assignments, I believe.  

They should also inform students of that they may go through a different process with web 2.0 technologies if some students are not used to web 2.0 assignments. As Gray et al (2012) found, students need to know they may not do well in the web 2.0 assignments at first. Students need to know that they may gradually find their unique voices, and understand the rules for sharing appropriately and writing with authority. Teachers also need to inform students that their process for doing their assignments would be assessed. As long as students know about that, they will purposely keep notes of their contributions to the assignments. Take Wiki-based collective assignments for example. Students need to know they should not directly overwrite others' input. Instead, they should leave a comment to others' editing. After two students agree on rewriting some sentences, they can do that. But they should make notes of that. This will make it easier for teachers to evaluate students' different contributions to the Wiki assignments.  However, Students not only demonstrate learning outcomes in a discipline, but also facilitate their learning processes in web 2.0 assignments (Gray et al, 2012). They facilitated their learning processes by optimizing peer review, extending the learning community, encouraging ongoing engagement (Gray et al, 2012). So to be fair, teachers should make clear about how they assign grades to individuals' contributions to facilitating the learning process. Let's imagine this situation: a student always lead the wiki writing, and leave positive comment and feedback to others' writing. His contribution needs definitely to be marked to encourage students to make such contributions.

Reference: 

Gray, K., Waycott, J., Clerehan, R., Hamilton, M., Richardson, J., Sheard, J., & Thompson, C. (2012). Worth it? Findings from a study of how academics assess students. Research in Learning Technology 2012, 2, 21-35- doi: 10.3402/rlt.v20i0/16153

How can we evaluate students' interaction in web 2.0 assignments?

 Teachers do not know how to evaluate students' interaction (Gray et al., 2012).  I think evaluation of interactions on social media should refer to evaluation of student participation in online discussions in Blackboard or other learning management system. Even though social media is a new research area, online discussion is not a new one. Many studies have focused on how to evaluate what and how to evaluate online discussions in various platforms. This rubric should include the three aspects: the quality, quantity, timing, and the nature of student participation in social media. This rubric is based on Dennen (2005)’s definition of participation in online discussion. The nature of student participation refers to on-topic, off-topic or administrative or technical issues while the quality of student participation is the level of dialogue (Dennen, 2005).

But there are some problems. It’s hard to evaluate the quality of student participation in social media. It’s hard to let students focus on the topic on social media related to the class all the time. Take a class Twitter hashtag for example, some students may share some interesting pictures or videos which are not related to our course content. Some students often retweet or favorites others’ tweets. Other students just read the tweets without leaving any footprints. Still others never care about class tweets because they do not get used to using twitter for learning purpose. For these students who do not participate in Twitter, teachers cannot blame them because they feel free to use it or not.

Indeed, one merit of evaluation of learning activities on social media is “capturing the visible evidence of invisible learning” (Bass and Eynon 2009, p. 4). Nowadays, with specific social media analytic tools like Klout and Google Analytics, students’ page views, watching videos, and checkpoints can be accurately recorded and analyzed. Take a class twitter hashtag for example, teachers can easily use Twitter analytic tools to analyze interaction between students and teachers. Students’ retweets, replies, and favorites can be easily analyzed. The social network analysis tool can be also used to analyze social network among students and teachers to check who have more interactions with whom, and who the center of the conversation in this class is.

Bass, R. & Eynon, B. (2009) ‘Capturing the visible evidence of invisible learning (Introduction and synthesis of findings)’, Academic Commons, (January), pp. 4_29.

Dennen, V. P. (2005). From message posting to learning Dialogues:  Factors affecting learner participation in asynchronous discussions. Distance 

Making Money by Using Social Media?

 I like this short but interesting video which is about how social media comes to use in connecting customers and companies. In the past, customers need to write down comments, rate the flavors for ice creams, and leave notes for other customers on a board in front an ice cream store. Nowadays, with social media like Twitter, Facebook, customers can easily do such things online. So companies can make better flavors for ice creams, while customers can get what they want based on other customers’ ratings, and notes. Also, customers feel they participate in producing better and better flavors. Isn’t that a mutual interest enabled by social media?

What is the difference between Edmodo and Symbaloo EDU?

First,, I want to give credit to Chuncoo. I am inspired by his comparison of Edmodo and Symbaloo EDU. Check his blog out. https://hescholarintraining.wordpress.com/2015/07/23/web-2-0-tools-of-the-week-720-726/

 After watching the videos about Symbaloo EDU and exploring the two tools, I find these tools share the similarity and difference. They have in common that they all aim at offering a platform for teachers and students to connect with each other outside of classroom by sharing resources, leaving comments, and the like. But the difference is bigger.

Edmodo is like an open blackboard for serving education. After the teacher creates a group for a class, there are automatically functions including note, assignment, quiz and poll. Teachers can easily communicate with students by leaving a note, invite a poll, and create all kinds of quiz. They can check students’ progress all the time, and give student badges. I think digital badges is one feature for this Edmodo. The open feature for Edmodo is mainly embodied by the search function. Teachers can search for posts, groups, apps and more in this website, which is powerful. Even though it is an open blackboard, I do not think it is much better than Blackboard. It’s just my opinion. When I search for “facebook”, results did not include the facebook webpage for me. All results were other teachers’ username. So I think this Edmodo is not open as Symbaloo EDU.

 Symbaloo EDU is also serving education, which is more like a webmix. After teachers create a Symbaloo EDU account, all websites related to education pop up on the screen including PBS, Edmodo, KHAN academy. I especially like EDU news, which is useful. Teachers are welcome to add more webmix to their account and share with their students. Emphasizing on knowledge sharing in the symbaloo is the powerful feature. After teachers share a webmix, students can communicate with teachers inside a webmix including facebook, twitter, email or other tools.

 Based on the above, I prefer Symbaloo EDU, which shows the power of web 2.0 tools in knowledge sharing, and social networking.

 Your feedback is so welcome. I cannot think more about the differences between them. Look forward to your thoughts.

What issues do you find about searching online? Unorganized resources? Fake information? Taking it easy?

I could not agree more with issues with Web 2.0 inquiry found out in Crook (2012)'s study: unauthorized resources, unorganized resources, and simply copy or cut and paste. They are so true. In old times, I relied on Wikipedia to search for new terms or phrases or events. Later, someone told me there were lots of mistake with Wikipedia results, and I should not trust it. Now I would just use it to check the background for the topic I am interested, and then continue to search online for other resources.

When searching for answers to our questions, we are always offered lots of unorganized resources out there. Many irrelevant but interesting entertainment websites popping up always distract us from the questions we are really working on. For example, we may be attracted by gossiping news about a movie star. In my case, I sometimes need to search for articles related to one topic. Once I searched for articles about a topic, lots of pictures, news, or social networking sites came out. I was upset with the large amount of information. Even though I narrowed down my research by setting the keywords in the google scholar, I got hundreds of articles which were not so related. Then when I used the Proquest to search for articles, still hundreds of articles came out. It took me time to choose articles I should check out. As Crook (2012) argued students really need support in finding right high-quality learning resources.

The last issue is actually most important. Web 2.0 tools make it too easy to cut, and then paste. When students work on their paper, when they find some interesting ideas posted by someone online, they feel an urge to cut, and paste. I have been there. When I was an undergraduate student, when writing a paper about why one educational policy or theory was working well, I would search for answers to that question. I rarely read though the book or articles about the topic back then. I just copied and pasted others’ opinions without thinking critically about it. I must admit that cutting and pasting really interfere with students’ critical thinking and independent thinking. With the popularity of Web 2.0 tools, regarding a theory or policy, we can find so diversified voices out there from so many people all over the world. This makes students feel safe to just cut and paste some sentences from somewhere because they think teachers must not have time to go through all resources related to a topic. I did feel in this way back then. Eventually, I was told students’ thinking was totally wrong. With much experiences, most teachers can easily detect whether construct your own ideas by integrating existing resources, or easily steal others’ ideas.

So what do you think of the three problems with Web 2.0 inquiry?

References


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Crook, C. (2012). The ‘digital native’ in context: tensions associated with importing
     Web 2.0 practices into the school setting. Oxford Review of Education, 38(1),  
     63-80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2011.577946

Does the look of blogger matter for readers? It matters! You will find ways to improve the look of your blog!

I just customized my blogger layout and background. After designing the visual look by myself, I feel good about it. I feel more motivated to keep checked it, and look forward to others' visits. Is it awkward to feel in this way? I am afraid not. The visual features of a blogger indeed impress readers in a negative way and positive way.

 I just found  The 15 Best Design Blogs of 2013. You can check it out. Hope you will be inspired by those creative and nice blogs! 

Here comes a handwriting one! https://flic.kr/p/2oG2F

Also, I recommend that you check this article out. http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/newsletters/does-your-blog-design-matter/

In this article, the blogger talks about how the design of his blog affects his blog traffic. Quote his sentences."I’ve received praise from readers and other bloggers about my blog design. I know for a fact that some people bookmark my blog specifically because of the design." 

How can we stop procrastination in case we are stressed out because of the deadline?

Being exposed to lots of others' ideas published on social media, we are giving out time to others' hands. When reading updated posts in Facebook, Wechat, Twitter, or Blog, I felt thrilled at learning from others, and enjoyed myself. I felt excited at reading papers, and taking notes. I hope I could spend most of time reading others' thoughts, and enjoying their shared knowledge.

However, as a Ph.D, we need to be productive, come up with new meaningful research idea, and write papers. Well, writing paper is not an enjoyable thing to do. Even though I enjoyed collecting data and data analysis, I was not a fan of writing a paper. Setting a fixed writing time is really really necessary. However, thinking back to the past, I missed the writing time and thought I would make up for it. But now I do not have time to make up for the missed writing time because I am in the middle of other things.

I know clearly except for other reasons, procrastination makes me end up like this: rushing for finishing a proposal which is due tomorrow. So I really want to change this bad habit. I find some useful tips.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200909/ending-procrastination-right-now. You can check it out to find whether they work for you.

Time is tight. Just have a rest, and go back to working on it.  Good luck with me and other students who work on their proposals.

So what do you think of the social media landscape in 2014 illustrated in this picture @cc?

 I found the picture about "Social Media Landscape 2014"  by fredcavazza is licensed under CC BY 2.0.  

This picture describes the what social media tools we have now.  I must say it is very inclusive to include "reddit", "weibo", "qq", "renren" which are popular in China. I feel excited about this picture because it places different social media according to their main function and the popularity. For example,  Facebook, Twitter, and Google plus are definitely most popular. They are also featured by all the four functions. Then wechat, what'sapp, and the like follow. It is also clear that people publish their status or knowledge, share knowledge or feelings, discussing with others, and building networking through social network.  We can see, at the left top corner, blogger, wordpress, and the like are used to publish content, and post. Then Pinterest, instagram, youtube and the like at the top are mainly used to share pictures, videos wiht others. Again at the top, reddit, skype, Ning, and the like are mainly used to discuss with others regarding a topic. Reddit is a perfect example. Participants on Reddit always talk about some popular topics like MOOCs. The last but not least function is networking.  Here, Linkedin, QQ, renren and the likem are most used to building networking. For example, Linkedin is well-recognized tool for building professional networking. Renren has the same function in China. 

The last thing I want to talk about this picture is about the understanding of social media. In this picture, it defines social media in terms of media, commerce, services, and technology. According to my understanding of the picture, social media is first media, which is enabled by computer technology and internet. Social media can be used for online commerce, and offer services on different purposes.  

So what do you think of the social media landscape in 2014 illustrated in this picture?  

Do we always get the credit for what we create?

I am thinking about a simple issue. Could we really give the credit to everyone who produce something? For example, I am using Scoop.it to curate all kinds of resources. My collection and annotations, I believe, can help others under the topic "MOOC" better. Do I own a credit for my collection? I would not go that far. 

Then, I think one thing. Should we be given credit for creating our unique browser history? You know, it is very important to propose a new question. If I proposed one question which leads to a new idea, would I be given the credit for the new idea? Just curious. 

Crowdsourcing is scaring or a blessing?

Crowdsourcing is a cool concept. It assumes that everyone has one aspect of information. Like one classmate mentioned, everyone can share the traffic information via the waze app. I think this is very cool. Even if the camera could take photos of major moments, but it cannot consistently take photos of the whole scene. You know, due to the angle limitation, it is impossible for the camera to record every corner of the traffic. If one accident happens, it will be quicker for someone to call 911 than waiting for the camera report.  I also think it is cool to ask everyone to tweet the flood location. Even though there is a risk of inaccurate information, there is big chance that someone would save others’ life by recording detailed information.

I actually think the concept of crowdsourcing can be utilized for research.  According to the crowdsourcing, everyone can offer valuable information. For example, it is hard to recruit parents and children on the national level to ask them about how they view the effects of “genius hours” on students’ creativity. But it’s easy for the researcher to put the survey online via the Twitter. Followers for the researcher can participate in the survey, and then retweet the survey. I think via the Twitter, an online survey can go to everyone who has one twitter account.

However,” crowdsourcing is a very controversial concept, especially because it is now applied to so many fields. The crowd has become the source for a great variety of tasks and the incentives are heterogenous as well. The lack of boundaries between work and play makes it so difficult to evaluate crowdsourcing and it gets particularly tricky when the projects are profit-oriented “  https://re-publica.de/session/crowdsourcing-design-good-bad-and-ugly

How about fake data?

As Reyman (2013) claimed, “providing access to information, enabling connections with others, empowering individuals, and facilitating participation in powerful and meaningful ways” (p. 513). However, I am thinking about the safety and validity of data produced by users’ participation in social websites.  

Due to online business, we often offer our identification information on certain websites. Even though the website is under protection, we cannot 100% sure that it will not be leaked. Now, the online crime is rising. You can check via this link http://www.carnegiecyberacademy.com/facultyPages/cyberCriminals/operate.html. You can see those technique guy or hankers can always find our information. If the Big Brother can have access to our identification information, I am sure those hackers can do the same thing. So how can we make sure of the safety of our data in this super open environment? Even if our shared information is not about identification information like SSN, how could we let others know some bad things we have done? I think safety data is associated with the privacy of data.  

The other issue is about the validity of data. Do we always tell the truth about ourselves, our feelings, and status online? Now we always go to Google or Wikipedia to find our answers to our questions. But before we do that, do we always ask about this question: can we trust answers offered online? I had the experience of offering fake data online. I once bought a dress online which had the poor quality. So I left a bad comment on that dress. Then I kept bothered by the owner of that online store until I deleted my bad comment and left a wonderful comment to that online store. I felt bad about that experience. After that, I shared this experience with other friends, they had those kinds of experiences all the time. Under this circumstance, it’s hard to trust customer comments on Amazon.com and other business platforms. 

I know it’s very important to be made sure of the authority for our information or artifacts. But how about the situations where we would rather to keep anonymous?  It’s good for Facebook to allow us to share all kinds of information, including pictures, videos, and audios. But how about the situations where we just want to post something while keeping anonymous?

I know I propose lots of questions in this blog. I hope someone could offer their opinions. 

Would you consider about building an online personal teaching network even when you are not a teacher?

I  love one old saying "a best way to learn is by teaching others". I think this also reflects the idea of sharing with others, and collaborative learning. When we share our knowledge with others, we always pay attention to the accuracy and comprehensiveness of it. Every time I feel bored at a lesson or topic I am learning about, I will try to imagine how I will imitate the teacher’s teaching strategy like interesting examples in order to teach my future students. When I think in that way, I will focus on the lesson or topic, and think deeply about it. 

This is why I like the concept of “Building an online personal teaching network”. You can check it by the below picture. Even though I am now a student, I sometimes try to view myself as a teacher especially when I design an online course as an intern or research assistant. So I would try to build my personal teaching and learning network at the same time. 

I think the concept of “building an online personal teaching network (PTN)” is related to the topic “OpenCourse Ware” in this week. Those open courses have been developed by individual teachers in various fields. If each of us allow anyone to be connected with our teaching network, then anyone can learn from our teaching materials, resources, and even connections. Imagine if I am connected with a famous and fabulous teacher like Vanessa in my PTN, others can check Vanessa’s PTN, and then find more useful learning resources. Right?

Siemens proposed that Connectivism is considering Learning as Network Creation (2005). He again claimed “The capacity to know is more critical than what is actually known” (Siemens, 2008, para. 6). In other words, it is of importance to know about which network where we can find information we are interested.

In a nutshell, I think building an online personal teaching network and learning network is worthy, and one part of OCW movement. 

Reflections on my reading on Chapter 7 Networked work

Before reading the chapter 7, I did not think a lot about networked work. I have taken it for granted. You know, everyone is doing things in a similar way. 

As Rainie & Wellman (2012) claimed, networked work blurred the boundary between work and life.  I always use my laptop, mobile phone and internet to work. It often happens I work at home. Since I need to take the last school bus every day at 5:12, I always get off work early. However, I cannot afford to not to work or study at all after 5:12. After having dinner, my focus is on my work. Most of time, I do the readings, check the discussion board posts for this course, write a journal, publish a Twitter post, communicate with community members I observe. Twice in a week, I have a video conference with a student in China. In a world, I am really seeing networked work going on.

Networked work also allows us to work in different groups. I am now working as a teaching assistant in Office of Distance Learning (ODL), an intern in the Strozier library, an online student for this course, and a research group member. In the research group, one member is now in China. Most of time, I use email to contact my boss in office of Distance Learning, facilitator in the Strozier library. If some emergent situation occurs, I test messages to my boss in ODL or make phone calls. As an online student, I often communicate with my classmates online, publish twitter, and share my opinions and experiences in my blog.  As Rainie & Wellman (2012) claimed, work offline is also necessary to build mutual trust, and improve communication efficiency. In a week, most of time, I work in the Strozier library for three hours, and have face-to-face meeting with my boss. Once in a week, I visit my boss in ODL to finalize some issues.

The attached picture is about what I am now working on. When I writing this blog, I am opening six tabs in total. One Tab is to check my emails once I receives a new email. The second tab is to listen to music. As long as I feel exhausted, and not so focused, I would play a beautiful piece of music to relax myself. The third tab is the Kindle version of the textbook. When I need to quote sentences from the textbook, I would go back to check it. The fourth one is to check updated Twitter for our course. The fifth one is to check updated discussion posts submitted by my classmates. The final one is, of course, to work on my blog. Am I definitely involved in networked work, right?

So this is my experiences with networked work. Could you share you experiences? 

Let's rewrite the great play "Romeo and Juliet"

Hi, all

This is a hilarious scene. Let's rewrite the great play "Romeo and Juliet" 

“Failing to communicate in a timely fashion: Romeo and Juliet each committed suicide because of the lack of timely communication. Romeo killed himself because he thought that Juliet was dead. The letter alerting him to Juliet’s special sleeping potion never got to him. If only they had texted. The play would have to be rewritten for the mobile era— but would it be more comedy than tragedy if they died because their batteries ran out of power?” (Rainie &Wellman, 2012, p. 2289)

I want to rewrite like this. Romeo and Juliet can use Skype, Google hangout to do video chatting. They can text to each other and talk with each other every day. They can also keep in touch with each other through Facebook and Twitter. Meanwhile, they can ask their fans to help them getting married. Without parents’ blessing, it is still possible for them to get married. Even If they do not want to do that, they can become a virtual couple in a virtual community.  

Do you like my rewriting idea? How will you rewrite the great play by taking mobile technology into consideration?  

Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2012). The Mobile Revolution. In Networked: The New Social Operating System (pp. 2286-2289). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.

How do you distinguish Connected Presence, Absent Presence, and Present Absence" ?

When reading about "Mobile Revolution", I came across the different concepts: Connected Presence, Absent Presence, and Present Absence. Could you differentiate the three concepts? 

“absent presence” can "created awkward, annoying social discontinuities as people 'leave' the group they are physically a part of to take a call or respond to a text message from someone afar" (Rainie &Wellman, 2012, p. 2713). 

"Moreover, Europeans often sit among friends at cafés while simultaneously using their mobile phones to incorporate absent friends into their group conversations. To complement Gergen’s notion of “absent presence,” we call this 'present absence'" (Rainie &Wellman, 2012, p. 2740) 

Rainie, L., & Wellman, B. (2012). The Mobile Revolution. In Networked: The New Social Operating System (pp. 2711-2740). The MIT Press. Kindle Edition.”

Is hyperconnectivity good or bad?

I think the hyperconnectivity enabled by mobile phone cause the pressure for us. “The expectation and reality of perpetual access also creates stresses. Jeremiah, a tech-sector worker interviewed by Pew Internet (who only wanted us to use his first name) described his evolution as a manager of his social relationships. Jeremiah began to regulate his accessibility. First, he started using email “away” messages to inform others when he was focusing on particular tasks and to reduce the pressure he felt to respond quickly to all emails— both work and personal. After that, he likewise used away messages on his mobile phone to let callers know what he was doing and when he would be able to receive and respond to voicemail messages. He also created several email accounts to share with close friends and colleagues to allow them different pathways to him that he monitored more frequently” (Rainie &Wellman, 2012, p. 2586).

Like Jeremiah, I am learning to control my accessibility. I used to be accessible to everyone who call me. I would friendly pick up phones from others no matter whether I was busy. That really interrupted my study, and work. I felt with my phone at hand, I would never focus on my study. But I do not do that anymore. I am learning to balance my work and life, and own my personal time. So I do not easily give others my phone number. I prefer giving someone who I just know my WeChat username or Facebook username. So I can decide whether or when I will respond to them. I do not make myself accessible any time. Take the intimate relationship for example. In old times, I wanted my boy friends to respond to every message I sent, and every call I made. If he missed my call or message, I would be mad and angry. I would think he did not love me anymore. Think back to that. I was crazy. Now I realize that everyone has their own schedule for work and study including my boyfriend. We could not be rude to interrupt others' life with our mobile phone. "We’ve really gone from the anytime, anywhere ethic to one where you have go through protocols and permissions to get to deal with someone" (Rainie &Wellman, 2012, p. 2607).

I am wondering about how you control your accessibility since you have a phone. 

Let's explore topics regarding MOOCs together by using Scoop.it!

When I took the MOOC named "SMOOC (Social Media for Active Learning)", I signed up for the website Scoop.it. I actually like the website. I curated one topic"MOOC". I will share articles, news, and comments which I think are worth taking a look at. I personally keep updated with the challenges, chances, barriers that MOOCs have met. 

Generally speaking, there are three issues I am interested: Quality assurance of MOOCs, Student engagement, and the benefits of MOOCs. 

Are you interested in the topic"MOOC"? If yes, you are welcome to check my Scoop.it website!  http://www.scoop.it/t/mooc-by-zhongrui-yao/curate

Talking about why I rarely share knowledge

According to Kosonen (2009), "factors that seem to promote knowledge sharing include individual motivations, personal characteristics, technical attributes, and community-level social capital." I think the four factors make sense. Take myself for example. I rarely share knowledge online.
When taking my individual motivation into consideration, I am not so interested in sharing my knowledge in virtual community. I am a lurker most of time because I enjoy reading others' knowledge sharing. But if some members in a community have some misunderstanding of my field, or concepts as well as practice in my field, I would like to share expertise due to obligation (Kosonen ,2009, p. 155). Regarding the extrinsic motivation, it is not applicable for me. I would feel it is not right if I share knowledge in order to get money or praises. If I would share knowledge with others, I would be "fostered by enjoyment: satisfaction, learning, reciprocal help" (Kosonen ,2009, p. 148). When my classmates and friends need me to share knowledge, I would not hesitate to do it. I am totally OK with reciprocal help.

Regarding personal characteristics, I am relatively introvert. Most of time, I am not used to share my life and study with others. "In China, modesty requirements and a high degree of competitiveness (the need to ‘own’ knowledge) are serious barriers to knowledge sharing in VCoPs " (Kosonen ,2009, p. 147). I agree with the summary. I have been taught to be modest by teachers, parents, and the whole society. I have been told that "Do not be proud of yourself. Do not show that you know lots of things. As long as you do that, people would make judgement. You will be criticized as cocky. You do not want to be famous."  "To maintain your competitive advantages, you should not share your secrets or thoughts with others". Luckily, being exposed to western cultures, I have changed my mindset to a large extent. I have tried to share what I know with others, learn from others, and collaborate with others. Actually, this is a better way of learning, I believe.  However, I think I am not knowledgeable enough to pass knowledge to others. In other words, I have low self-efficacy. Also,the knowledge I obtained online with them. In other words, I used to underestimate the importance of curation of knowledge.

As with technical attributes, I would take usability into consideration. Preece (2000) measured usability in terms of support for social interaction (such as feedback and prompts), information design (understandability), ease of navigation and access (response time, downloading speed). I was once in a community based on Wiki. The response time and downloading speed really killed me.

Finally, regarding social capital, trust and prior knowledge about others would definitely affect how much I would love to share knowledge. I am afraid that others would make judgement about me. I am also afraid others would be more knowledgeable about those topics I want to share. As long as I trust all community members, I would love to share my personal experiences, opinions, and solutions. Take the course in Web 2.0 for example. Since I trust the teacher, teaching assistant, and classmates, I would not mind sharing what I have known.

In a nutshell, for me, the four factors affect my participation in sharing knowledge in an online community.

What about you? Are you an expressive person? Which factor affect you most? 

References

Kosonen, M. (2009). Knowledge sharing in virtual communities-a review of the empirical research. International Journal of Web Based Communities, 5(2), 144-163.
Preece, J. (2000) Online Communities. Designing Usability, Supporting Sociability, Chichester: Wiley.

Is a high FoMo level bad or good?

FoMo – the “fear of missing out” – is a relatively new concept where people are concerned that others may be having more fun and rewarding experiences than them. It is characterised as the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing. Check this link to read more about 
FoMo effects. 
I want to share my FoMo level here as shown in Figure 1. You can also get your FoMo level via the FoMo quiz. 

Figure 1 My FoMo Level

While doing the quiz, I am starting to think about whether having a high FoMo level is good or bad. For me, at weekends, I always spend more time in talking with my roommates, friends, and families. I want to know what is going on in their life. The first thing I often do when I wake up is to check my friends' updated status via WeChat. And the last thing I often do before I fall asleep to check my friends' status and their messages sent to me. As long as my phone is at hands, I want to check updated information which I am interested. I agree that I have a high FoMo. When I focused on my own entertainment or study at weekends without checking those updates, I felt nervous. Did I miss some important information? Did my friends have wonderful experiences like getting married or travelling? 

FoMo is not a good thing for me. When we keep up with others' life, we sometimes feel unsatisfactory with our own life, and then feel unhappy. My aim is to reduce my FoMo level in my personal life. 

But I hope I can have a high FoMo level in a learning and professional community. Take the Web 2.0 course for example, it's good to keep up with my classmates' posts on Discussion board, Twitter, Wikis, and blogs. For this course, I should know what my classmates are thinking about or talking about.  

What's your opinion? Is a high FoMo level bad or good?  

What Have Happened Since My phone is not Connected with the Network

I bought a phone in last summer in China. Due to the limitation of the phone operation system, I could not use the mobile phone network. Since two weeks ago, I have been not be able to use Wifi with the phone. In other words, during the two weeks, my phone has been out of the network. Could you imagine that? Since my phone is out of the network the whole time, I cannot use the social media app including QQ, Wechat, Facebook and Twitter any more through my phone.

At first, I felt so uncomfortable. When connected with the network, before I get up or fall asleep, I check my Wechat. I often chat with my best friends in China with Wechat frequently. Without the network, I could not use Wechat anymore. My computer is with Window operation system. So I cannot log in my Wechat by using my laptop. I told my best friends that they can chat with me by using QQ. However, like me, they do not often use QQ anymore. So, during the last two weeks, my friends in China and I have not chatted with each other.  I really miss my conversations with my friends. But I could not do anything.

Now I am used to be out of Wechat. I will wait for the new Iphone. Meanwhile, I begin to think about the effects of wechat on the relationship between people. Wechat enable my friends and me to chat with each other anytime and anywhere, thus maintaining an intimate relationship between us. So what have happened since I could not use Wechat anymore? They do not try to use QQ to connect with me because they are getting used to the Wechat. I do not try to use QQ to chat with them because I know they won’t respond to me. They do not often check their QQ message any more. In other words, when getting used to a social media tool, we would refuse to use the other one. This finding makes me feel a little scary.  A social media tool could effectively affect the relationship and communication between people.