Social Media Commons^™

Eportfolios: Supporting Reflection And Deep Learning In High-Impact Practices, Kathleen Harrington, Tian Luo

STEMPS Faculty Publications

[First paragraph]

Eportfolios are a powerful pedagogical tool that can support deep learning and reflection across various learning contexts. This digital assignment can facilitate integrative learning and make learning visible to students, instructors, and external stakeholders (Chen and Light 2010). Eportfolios provide a space for students to showcase curricular and cocurricular experiences, to reflect on and integrate this work, and to directly assess their learning (Yancey 2004). Like high‐impact educational practices, eportfolios require significant and purposeful “time on task” outside the classroom, provide opportunities for meaningful student–faculty interaction, allow for frequent feedback on student work, and show students how their …

The Strength Of Weak Social Ties: Social Activism And Facebook, Nichole Akai Giraldi

Sociology & Criminal Justice Theses & Dissertations

The use of Social Networking Sites, Facebook in particular, has become a major avenue of communication; Facebook has become a platform where people can discuss any topic of their choice to include social issues within society. While some argue Facebook is only a disseminator of information, others argue that in addition to being a disseminator of information it is also a motivator of social activism. Facebook profiles consist of one’s social ties, both strong and weak, which have the potential to expose users to different information daily. Using Mark Granovetter’s strength of weak social ties theory as a framework, the …

"We Can't Do It Without You!" Crowdfunding As Cultural And Economic Negotiations Within Neoliberal Culture, David Zachary Gehring

Institute for the Humanities Theses

This thesis is a qualitative study that critically examines crowdfunding campaigns established to fund music projects. It argues that these campaigns are instantiations of neoliberalism, influenced by and reflective of cultural commitments operative within music communities and a shifting industrial context. For this study, neoliberalism represents a particular mode of free market capitalism characterized by discourses emphasizing individual agency free from regulatory constraints, and the rearticulation of cultural values rhetorically prioritized over market interests. Emerging within this cultural and industrial ecology informed and motivated by neoliberalism, and shaped through the dynamic flux of fan/artist relationships and industrial uncertainty, the crowdfunding …

Buying Love Through Social Media: How Different Types Of Incentives Impact Consumers’ Online Sharing Behavior, Yueming Zou

Marketing Theses & Dissertations

A key issue in social media marketing is insufficient consumer participation and engagement. Oftentimes companies have to devise tactics to encourage more social sharing of brand messages, such as through the use of incentives and rewards. Previous research has investigated incentive effects under the traditional offline context, which addresses mostly economic exchanges and fails to consider the social dynamics of the social media environment. Addressing this gap, this research aims to answer the following research question: how can companies target different consumers with different incentives to maximize consumer sharing through social media? Specifically, the present research proposes three factors that …

Gaining S-T-E-A-M: A General Athletic Department Social Media Strategy, Brendan O'Hallarn, Craig A. Morehead, Shana L. Pribesh

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

In the 10 years since the invention of Facebook, social media sites have become an indispensable part of the marketing and communications strategy employed by a broad spectrum of organizations, including university athletic departments. While social media is almost universally used, a review of academic literature suggests the study of deployment of social media resources, and analysis of their effectiveness, is still very much in preliminary stages. Professional literature on social media use is out in front of peer-reviewed research. Therefore, we use Funk’s framework for social media practices as a point of departure, offering a social media strategy specifically …

Viability Of Using Twitter To Support Peer Instruction In Teacher Education, Tian Luo, Danielle E. Dani, Li Cheng

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This paper reports on a case study in which Twitter served as a backchannel to mediate and support the peer-teaching activity in a face-to-face teacher education course. Surveys and interviews were utilised to understand the effectiveness of the Twitter integration and students' perceived learning in a Twitter-supported peer teaching environment. Tweets were used to determine how preservice teachers used Twitter to support peer instruction. Most students were able to use the Twitter platform to produce and retrieve peer feedback, while some encountered technical difficulties. Our current analysis suggests the Twitter-based peer feedback was moderately successful in this peer teaching activity. …

Lurkers, Creepers, And Virtuous Interactivity: From Property Rights To Consent To Care As A Conceptual Basis For Privacy Concerns And Information Ethics, D. E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Exchange of personal information online is usually conceptualized according to an economic model that treats personal information as data owned by the persons these data are ‘about.’ This leads to a distinct set of concerns having to do with data ownership, data mining, profits, and exploitation, which do not closely correspond to the concerns about privacy that people actually have. A post-phenomenological perspective, oriented by feminist ethics of care, urges us to figure out how privacy concerns arrive in fundamentally human contexts and to speak to that, rather than trying to convince people to care about privacy as it is …

Embedding Online Based Learning Strategies Into The Engineering Technology Curriculum, Vukica M. Jovanovic, Otilia Popescu, Orlando M. Ayala, Mileta Tomovic, Alok K. Verma

Engineering Technology Faculty Publications

Various blended learning strategies have been implemented at engineering technology programs to facilitate different learning styles and different time constraints given to faculty. Some of these efforts are related to the effective use of online tools such as online course management systems, ePortfolios, narrated presentations, web-based polling systems, tutorials and educational materials posted before the class and asynchronous learning methods. As technology changes, some of the online learning methods are getting more advanced which is enabling more innovative approaches and data compression. Various distance learning programs started with having access to videos of recorded lectures (on VHS tapes, or CDs) …

Pre-Service Teacher Social Networking Decisions And Training Needs: A Mixed Methods Study, Helen Crompton, Kelly Rippard, Jody Sommerfeldt

Teaching & Learning Faculty Publications

The use of social networks in America has risen nearly tenfold in a decade, rising from 7% in 2005 to 65% in 2015. This rise in the use of social networks has presented new ethical, legal, and professional challenges for educators. Teachers are held to higher standards of moral behavior than the general population. This mixed-methods study examined the types of social networks used by pre-service teachers and if they are making good decisions when using social networks. The findings show that the pre-service teachers were unsure what to post. Based on this finding, the researchers provide training suggestions to …

Flooding In The Media, Jeremy Wheeler

July 24, 2015: Communicating Frequent Flooding

No abstract provided.

We Developed A Smart Phone App On Flooding And Then The Hard Work Began, Skip Stiles

July 24, 2015: Communicating Frequent Flooding

No abstract provided.

Detecting, Modeling, And Predicting User Temporal Intention, Hany M. Salaheldeen

Computer Science Theses & Dissertations

The content of social media has grown exponentially in the recent years and its role has evolved from narrating life events to actually shaping them. Unfortunately, content posted and shared in social networks is vulnerable and prone to loss or change, rendering the context associated with it (a tweet, post, status, or others) meaningless. There is an inherent value in maintaining the consistency of such social records as in some cases they take over the task of being the first draft of history as collections of these social posts narrate the pulse of the street during historic events, protest, riots, …

An Analysis Of User-Generated Comments On The Development Of Social Mobile Learning, Shenghua Zha, Wu He

Information Technology & Decision Sciences Faculty Publications

In this study, the authors used a mixed-method approach to analyze user-generated comments on social mobile learning from three leading news sites that report the latest development in higher education. Koole’s mobile learning model was used to code comments made by the public on the three news sites. Results showed that social mobile learning has gained an increasing public engagement in the past four years. Responders’ discussion in the comments primarily focused on four themes of social mobile learning: technology adoption, effective design, faculty training, and student training. In the end, the authors discussed the implications for developers and educators …

Social Media And The Organization Man, Dylan E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

On new dynamics in organizational psychology, self- and group-identity, character, and integrity in an age of social media, "Organizations may then have a similar relation to our integrity as does our character. Our character is formed by a history of actions and interactions, but we may not identify with the actions that it brings us to habitually perform. When we recognize our vices—e.g., intemperance—and seek to act in accordance with our values and beliefs, we act against our character and contribute thereby to reforming our habits and character to better align with the version of ourselves with which we identify. …

You Are What You Tweet: Connecting The Geographic Variation In America's Obesity Rate To Twitter Content, Ross J. Gore, Saikou Diallo, Jose Padilla

VMASC Publications

We conduct a detailed investigation of the relationship among the obesity rate of urban areas and expressions of happiness, diet and physical activity on social media. We do so by analyzing a massive, geo-tagged data set comprising over 200 million words generated over the course of 2012 and 2013 on the social network service Twitter. Among many results, we show that areas with lower obesity rates: (1) have happier tweets and frequently discuss (2) food, particularly fruits and vegetables, and (3) physical activities of any intensity. Additionally, we provide evidence that each of these results offer different and unique insight …

Characteristics Of Social Media Stories, Yasmin Ainoamany, Michele C. Weigle, Michael L. Nelson

Computer Science Faculty Publications

An emerging trend in social media is for users to create and publish "stories", or curated lists of web resources with the purpose of creating a particular narrative of interest to the user. While some stories on the web are automatically generated, such as Facebook’s "Year in Review", one of the most popular storytelling services is "Storify", which provides users with curation tools to select, arrange, and annotate stories with content from social media and the web at large. We would like to use tools like Storify to present automatically created summaries of archival collections. To support automatic story creation, …

Refusing A Spoiled Identity: How The Swinger Community Represents On The Web, Barbara Kreston

English Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation examines whether and how Websites provide a way for the unique community of swingers, also called Lifestylers, to represent a new (and revise an old) deviant identity without risk to their social and employment standing. Unlike many marginalized social groups who publically rally, swingers have had to take advantage of virtual space to safely appeal to their audiences. The time period studied includes the history of the swingers "spoiled" identity via academy articles, newspaper headlines, and moral turpitude clauses from the 1950s to the current use of the Web to showcase swingers and their clubs. The study used …

"Warning: This Is A Must Read": Participation And Disruption In Social Artifacts And Spaces, Angela M. Harrison Eng

English Theses & Dissertations

As I show in three separate case studies, content, technology, and participant relationships are key components in the design of social artifacts and spaces. One study highlights the invention and evolution of content across multiple spaces. The second shows content used as leverage for authority. The last case study examines the relationship between content and technological interfaces and how disruption may not always be successful.

All of these components make up what I refer to as disruption. Disruption describes participant acts that are executed to change existing power-based structures of information sharing. Using the insights gained from this research, I …

Digital Identity Formation: How Social Networking Sites Affect Real World Authenticity, Matthew Joseph Montoya

Institute for the Humanities Theses

The purpose of this paper is to explore the application of Heidegger's authenticity to online identity formation. This paper will attempt to determine if there is any way in which an authentic identity can be created, either online or offline, by using social networking sites. It will examine the positive and negative consequences of social networking sites to determine if these sites can help to contribute to our overall being, or determine if these sites serve only as a dangerous distraction to an authentic personal identity.

To do this, this paper will analyze Heidegger's philosophy to see if it is …

Veronica Mars Kickstarter And Crowd Funding, Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles Mcnutt, Luke Pebler

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

This conversation among Bertha Chin, Bethan Jones, Myles McNutt, and Luke Pebler about the Veronica Mars (2004–7) Kickstarter campaign to fund a film assesses the implications of crowd sourcing and fan labor.

#Nbcfail: A Qualitative Review Of The Shared Experience As A Social Movement, Brendan O'Hallarn, Stephen Shapiro

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

The XXX Olympic Games in London, England was the most-watched event in U.S. television history, with more than 219 million viewers tuning in during the Games. However, the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) elected to show a number of events to U.S. audiences in prime time via tape delay, rather than broadcasting them live. As a result NBC encountered a great deal of criticism about its coverage, particularly on the online microblogging site Twitter. This research surveyed a sample of Twitter users who participated in the Twitter protest via the #NBCFail hashtag, to understand how being part of a shared protest …

Information Architecture For Social Media: A Case Study On Building An Event Backchannel With Twitter, Robert L. Moore

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This paper presents a case study on creating a backchannel through Twitter for the live event, featuring the Secretary of the US Navy, hosted by the School of Government. The project, which ultimately was successful in creating social media buzz for the lecture, was a new approach for the School of Government in how it markets its events. The study discusses the tools and processes used in the backchannel's creation and development. This paper was written because the author discovered a gap in existing literature on creating backchannels. It outlines how the adaptation of best practices from the general population's …

Exploiting Fluencies: Educational Expropriation Of Social Networking Site Consumer Training, Lucinda Rush, Dylan E. Wittkower

Libraries Faculty & Staff Publications

The idea of the digital native was based on abstraction; when we look in detail at the digital activities of high-school and college students, we see deskilling and consumer training rather than information literacy or technical fluency. Yet that training is still training, and may be adaptable in such a way that it can become a literacy—in, for example, the way militaries have mobilised skill-sets produced through gaming. We too can and should mine the narrow and profit-driven consumer training that emerging adults have undergone for kinds of inquiry and critical engagement for which they may have inadvertently been given …

Facebook And Dramauthentic Identity: A Post-Goffmanian Model Of Identity Performance On Sns, Dylan E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Early and persistent scholarly concerns with online identity emphasized the ways that computer–mediated communications have allowed new, inventive, and creative presentations of self, and the lack of connection between online identity and the facts of off–line life. After the ascendency and following ubiquity of Facebook, we find our online lives transformed. We have not only seen online identity reconnected to off–line life, but we have seen, through the particular structures of social networking sites, our online lives subjected to newfound pressures to unify self–presentations from various constitutive communities; pressures different from and in some ways greater than those of off–line …

Lifespan Communication, Social Media Policy, And Societal Institutions: A Content Analysis, Jessica Larae Bedenbaugh

Communication & Theatre Arts Theses

This thesis is a qualitative study of the major societal institutions' social media policies. Three features are compared-length, readability, and legal orientation and punitive degree-in order to determine the homogeneity of the policies across the institutional categories. The top ten words featured in the policies, from highest weighted percentage to lowest, are the following: social, use, media, post, sites, content, personal, policy, communication, and web. The shortest policy length was 274 words. The longest policy was 36,036 words and the collective average word count was 2,571. The lowest reading level, based on the Gunning Fog Readability Index was 8.21, the …

The Residual Resistance Of The Individual Within The Rhizomatic Hegemony Of The Internet, Emma Katherine Wolfe

English Theses & Dissertations

Networked cyborgs that exist within the non-hierarchical rhizomatic network of the Internet risk losing the concept of their individuality as our identity becomes less important than the group. However, if the rhizomatic network is thought of as a hegemony that exists on the Internet, we can resist this through the residual notion of individual identity. Since cyborgs must perform in order to exist on the rhizomatic network, they can become aware of and perform their individuality through awareness of the computer medium. There are three methods for networked cyborgs to assert their individuality discussed in this thesis.

The first is …

A Phenomenology Of Sns Sharing, Dylan E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

In this contribution to a phenomenology of social network sites (SNS), we see how the share button brings about an alteration in our being-with others. On the side of the sharer, we see an experience of the world in a mode of possible retroactive sociality, creating an enigma in the constitution and attention of the subject of a given experience. On the side of the receiver, we see how being shared with creates sometimes unwelcome retrospective ideation of the sharer’s experience, and requires a choice whether, by liking or commenting, to bring the sharer into retroactive awareness of having been …

Using Twitter To Facilitate Case-Based Instruction In A Nursing Classroom, Sherleena Ann Buchman, Patricia Burke Snider, Tian Luo, Kaboni Gondwe

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This paper is a report on the use of Twitter within a sophomore level course in the baccalaureate nursing program at a rural Appalachian university. Students enrolled in the Foundations of Nursing course were in their second year of a traditional nursing program. Meeting the challenge of providing students with a ubiquitous learning environment that extends beyond their rural environment is important in the education of many students in the Appalachian region. The preliminary study looks at the usability of Twitter as the medium that will assist nursing students to build the confidence that comes from completing a case study …

Boredom On Facebook, Dylan E. Wittkower

Philosophy Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

Striking A Balance: Managing Blogs In Loosely Coupled Systems, Troy A. Swanson, Dennis E. Gregory, Edward E. Raspiller

Educational Leadership & Workforce Development Faculty Publications

As the oldest implementation of Web 2.0 technologies, blogs present an opportunity to understand how community college administrators are addressing two conundrums: conundrum of control and the conundrum of adaptability. These problems arise from the need of leaders to put organizational controls in place even as these controls limit the tool's usefulness and the adaptability of the technology. The purpose of this study using a multiple case study method is (1) to further the understanding of how community college administrators and blog authors strike a balance between organizational control and adaptability when implementing and using blog technologies and (2) to …