Social Media Commons^™

Facebooking In Distance Education: Constructing Virtual Communities Of Practice, Virginia M. Tucker

English Faculty Publications

The growth of distance education warrants a closer look at how virtual communities of practice form in asynchronous online classrooms. Prior studies have sought to identify a process to virtual community formation, which may vary depending upon the media used for collaboration. This microstudy examines how one student group in a distance writing course used the popular social media site Facebook to construct community and whether the stages of virtual community development were observed in this setting. Findings suggest that revisions might be made to our current understanding of the process of building virtual community within small groups. “Othering” and …

Haptics-Augmented Training Software For Undergraduate Engineering Mechanics, Ernur Karadogan, Robert L. Williams, David R. Moore, Tian Luo

STEMPS Faculty Publications

This paper presents the development efforts for a set of software activities and tutorials to augment teaching and learning in standard required undergraduate engineering mechanics courses. Using these software activities, students can change parameters, predict answers, compare outcomes, interact with animations, and feel the results. The overall system aims to increase teaching and learning effectiveness by rendering the concepts compelling, fun, and engaging. The problem with current examples and homework problems is that they are flat, static, boring, and non-engaging, which may lead to student attrition and a less than full grasp of fundamental principles. We implement integration of haptics …

Predictive Modeling For Navigating Social Media, Meiqun Hu

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Social media changes the way people use the Web. It has transformed ordinary Web users from information consumers to content contributors. One popular form of content contribution is social tagging, in which users assign tags to Web resources. By the collective efforts of the social tagging community, a new information space has been created for information navigation. Navigation allows serendipitous discovery of information by examining the information objects linked to one another in the social tagging space. In this dissertation, we study prediction tasks that facilitate navigation in social tagging systems. For social tagging systems to meet complex navigation needs …

Enhancing Classroom Learning Experience By Providing Structures To Microblogging-Based Activities, Tian Luo, Fei Gao

STEMPS Faculty Publications

Microblogging tools such as Twitter have been frequently adopted in educational settings to facilitate learning in recent years. Although the original purpose of microblogging tools is to connect with others in a wide network and instantly share what is happening to them with the rest of the world, educators have vigorously attempted to repurpose the utilization of the tool and integrate it into various educational settings to promote student learning.

The purpose of this study is to examine student learning experience under a set of structured microblogging-based activities and to identify the affordances and constraints of the technology. Students participated …

Digital Video: Engaging Students In Critical Media Literacy And Community Activism, Jessie Daniels

Publications and Research

This article presents a strategy for teaching health communication that fosters critical media literacy through the strategic combination of digital video, documentary film, video worksheets, and peer-reviewed journal articles. Given the media-saturated environment in which notions of health are shaped, critical media literacy skills are crucial to students in health-related fields. Cases of key concepts illustrated through documentary films and the peer-reviewed literature are presented. The article then explores how one class took the lead in designing a community event that critically engaged both a YouTube video and a documentary film about police brutality as a public health issue.

Rtbs: Your Audio Companion, 3am, Cori Schwabe, Casey Mattison, Kathryn Kawa, Allea Grummert, Nick Holle, Gabbi Silke, Derrick Sloan, Brittany Guindon, Amanda Hinrichs

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Student Advertising Projects

Radio Talking Book Service, a non-profit organization that assists the visually impaired by providing a free radio reading service, came to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a challenge: increase brand and service awareness throughout Nebraska.

We began by conducting both secondary and primary research, developing key insights and examining all possible target audiences. We investigated the day-to-day life of the visually impaired, learning that many who have experienced vision loss suffer from decreasing independence and increasing feelings of loneliness. Our primary research revealed that these individuals turn first to eye care professionals, resource organizations for the visually impaired and residential …

Facebook And Its Users: Using Grounded Theory To Understand Perceived Interactivity As A Constraint In The Rhetorical Situation, Katie Lee Retzinger Pruitt

English Theses & Dissertations

The general term interactivity has been used in a variety of disciplines to describe phenomena that occur in website interfaces; however, definitions and explanations about what constitutes interactivity and how it functions do not consider the specific ways in which interactivity can function and be perceived by users in specific rhetorical situations. In this study, I address the problems with the literature about general interactivity in writing studies and in other disciplines such as computer science, advertising, marketing, and communication studies by distinguishing between two types of interactivity—functional and perceived. I situate the different types of interactivity rhetorically, which can …

Modeling Social Strength In Social Media Community Via Kernel-Based Learning, Jinfeng Zhuang, Tao Mei, Steven C. H. Hoi, Xian-Sheng Hua, Shipeng Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Modeling continuous social strength rather than conventional binary social ties in the social network can lead to a more precise and informative description of social relationship among people. In this paper, we study the problem of social strength modeling (SSM) for the users in a social media community, who are typically associated with diverse form of data. In particular, we take Flickr---the most popular online photo sharing community---as an example, in which users are sharing their experiences through substantial amounts of multimodal contents (e.g., photos, tags, geo-locations, friend lists) and social behaviors (e.g., commenting and joining interest groups). Such heterogeneous …

Context-Based Friend Suggestion In Online Photo-Sharing Community, Ting Yao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the popularity of social media, web users tend to spend more time than before for sharing their experience and interest in online photo-sharing sites. The wide variety of sharing behaviors generate different metadata which pose new opportunities for the discovery of communities. We propose a new approach, named context-based friend suggestion, to leverage the diverse form of contextual cues for more effective friend suggestion in the social media community. Different from existing approaches, we consider both visual and geographical cues, and develop two user-based similarity measurements, i.e., visual similarity and geo similarity for characterizing user relationship. The problem of …

Wsm 2011: Third Acm Workshop On Social Media, Steven C. H. Hoi, Michal Jacovi, Ioannis Kompatsiaris, Jiebo Luo, Konstantinos Tserpes

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The Third Workshop on Social Media (WSM2011) continues the series of Workshops on Social Media in 2009 and 2010 and has been established as a platform for the presentation and discussion of the latest, key research issues in social media analysis, exploration, search, mining, and emerging new social media applications. It is held in conjunction with the ACM International Multimedia Conference (MM'11) at Scottsdale, Arizona, USA, 2011 and has attracted contributions on various aspects of social media including data mining from social media, content organization, geo-localization, personalization, recommendation systems, user experience, machine learning and social media approaches and architectures for …

Content Contribution Under Revenue Sharing And Reputation Concern In Social Media: The Case Of Youtube, Qian Tang, Bin Gu, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A key feature of social media is that it allows individuals and businesses to contribute contents for public viewing. However, little is known about how content providers derive payoffs from such activities. In this study, we build a dynamic structural model to recover the utility function for content providers. Our model distinguishes short-term payoffs based on ad revenue sharing from long-term payoffs driven by content providers’ reputation. The model was estimated using a panel data of 914 top 1000 providers and 381 randomly selected providers on YouTube from Jun 7th, 2010, to Aug 7th, 2011. The two different sets of …

Measuring Social Networks For Real-Time Competitive Advantage, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

Social networks offer up a goldmine of information just waiting to be exploited. For the first time, human relationships, comments and activities are documented quite publicly on platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Save for privacy concerns, never before has it been easier to know what people think, what they like, and to whom they are connected.

Exploring Tweets Normalization And Query Time Sensitivity For Twitter Search, Zhongyu Wei, Wei Gao, Lanjun Zhou, Binyang Li, Kam-Fai Wong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper presents our work for the Realtime Adhoc Task of TREC 2011 Microblog Track. Microblog texts like tweets are generally characterized by the inclusion of a large proportion of irregular expressions, such as ill-formed words, which can lead to significant mismatch between query terms and tweets. In addition, Twitter queries are distinguished from Web queries with many unique characteristics, one of which reflects the clearly distinct temporal aspects of Twitter search behavior. In this study, we deal with the first problem by normalizing tweet texts and the second by capturing the temporal characteristics of topic. We divided topics into …

Social Media: How Players And Athletic Organizations Can Use Social Media Technology For Positive Brand Awareness, Nina D. Bell

All Capstone Projects

Player transgressions and sponsorships were examined lightly using rhetorical and secondary research to consider the impact social media technology has had on sports marketing and communications. In discussing the impact, I was able to uncover the negative and positive implications for social media‟s involvement in sports, and how understanding it is imperative for individuals looking to become professionals in athletics. From my research, I will create a presentation which will assist professional athletes and their organization in creating a positive brand image using social media technology.

Mining Direct Antagonistic Communities In Explicit Trust Networks, David Lo, Didi Surian, Zhang Kuan, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There has been a recent increase of interest in analyzing trust and friendship networks to gain insights about relationship dynamics among users. Many sites such as Epinions, Facebook, and other social networking sites allow users to declare trusts or friendships between different members of the community. In this work, we are interested in extracting direct antagonistic communities (DACs) within a rich trust network involving trusts and distrusts. Each DAC is formed by two subcommunities with trust relationships among members of each sub-community but distrust relationships across the sub-communities. We develop an efficient algorithm that could analyze large trust networks leveraging …

On Modeling Virality Of Twitter Content, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim, Palakorn Achananuparp, Jing Jiang, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Twitter is a popular microblogging site where users can easily use mobile phones or desktop machines to generate short messages to be shared with others in realtime. Twitter has seen heavy usage in many recent international events including Japan earthquake, Iran election, etc. In such events, many tweets may become viral for different reasons. In this paper, we study the virality of socio-political tweet content in the Singapore’s 2011 general election (GE2011). We collected tweet data generated by about 20K Singapore users from 1 April 2011 till 12 May 2011, and the follow relationships among them. We introduce several quantitative …

Virality Modeling And Analysis, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Virality is a virus-like behavior that allows a piece of information to widely and quickly diffuse within the network of adopters through word of mouth. It is about how easy users propagate information to their friends and friends of friends by means of diffusion. While virality of information has several interesting applications, there are much research to be conducted on virality. These areas of research include understanding the mechanism of virality, modeling the virality both qualitatively and quantitatively, and applying virality to applications such as marketing, event detection, and others. In this paper, we survey existing works on quantitative models …

A Survey Of Information Diffusion Models And Relevant Problems, Minh Duc Luu, Tuan Anh Hoang, Ee-Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There has been tremendous interest in diffusion of innovations or information in a social system. Nowadays, social networks (offline as well as online) are considered as important medium for diffusion and large amount of research has been conducted to understand the dynamics of diffusion in social networks. In this work, we review some of the models proposed for diffusion in social networks. We also highlight the major features of these models by dividing the surveyed models into two categories: non-network and network diffusion models. The former refers to user communities without any knowledge about the user relationship network and the …

Growing Singapore's Funny Bone: Laughing In The Face Of Dangers, Pitfalls And Politicians, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

There was once a time in Singapore when the mocking of authority figures would be regarded as a no-go zone. Leaders and politicians were rarely subjects of comedy for such jokes would be considered too distasteful and disrespectful for mass consumption. Acceptable local comedy, as such, was limited to the physical and sometimes lowbrow variety.

Who Are The Heavy Users Of Social Networking Sites Among College Students? [Slides], Louisa Ha

School of Media and Communication Faculty Publications

Slides from a presentation presented at the Communication Technology Division, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Association Annual Convention, August 10-13, 2011 St. Louis, Missouri by Louisa Ha.