September 2009

Comps Time

I just received my first of 3 essay questions for my comps. I hate to wish away weeks of my life, but I can’t wait for Thanksgiving 🙂

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Voluntary vs Forced Interaction

A recent free report published in Faculty focus summarizes a survey of Twitter usage and trends among higher ed faculty. As noted in the summary to the report, about 20% are familiar or very familiar with Twitter and of those who use it 7% use it in the classroom. It is this group of teachers

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Blogging Motivations

Nardi, Shiano, and Gumbreckt (2004) summarize an ethnographic study of blogging considering motivations, social interactivity, and relationships between blogger and audience. From prior studies on blogging, blog “types” can be roughly categorized into three “types” including personal journals / online diary (the majority), “filters” which provide commentary and information from other websites, knowledge logs. However,

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Reciprocity

Reciprocity … certainly a concept that comes up frequently in discussions of networks. It came up again in a recent article by Huberman, Romero, and Wu (2008) regarding Twitter in which the authors’ found that 90 percent of a users’ friends reciprocate attention by being friends of the user which they suggest plays a role

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A Twitter User’s Tipping Point

TechCrunch had an interesting article from a few weeks back about why teens don’t (or do) tweet. As usual, it is important to try to find the story behind the numbers. The “story” (as summarized by TechCrunch) tells us that some studies suggest only 11% of Twitter users are teen which seems like a tiny

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Case Study “Research”

I’m trying to get my head around “case study research”. While I have read countless case studies, I tend not to put them in the category of research. Too often they read like “what I did last summer” reports where (again) I question the value to anyone but the souls associated directly with the situation

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