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?