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.