Category Archives: Social Media and Interesting Technology

Addicted to Facebook Friendships

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This article from the London Evening Standard is just about a year old, but I just discovered it.  Does Facebook lead to friendship addiction?  Is it a danger to people with addictive personalities?

FACEBOOK is to blame for “friendship addiction”, a leading psychologist warned today.

David Smallwood, an addictions expert with the Priory, says the social networking site is fuelling insecurity in users.

Women are particularly vulnerable because their self-worth stems from relationships with others and Facebook compels them to “acquire” hundreds of friends, says Mr Smallwood.

According to the article, the phenomenon is particularly pronounced in countries like Britain where “social networking sites are becoming a substitute for families in countries like Britain where traditional ties have become weaker.”
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The thing that makes a site like Facebook addictive, according to Smallwood, is the emphasis on acquisition, which Smallwood calls “an addictive process.

“Acquisition of friends is like any other fix but it’s competitive you judge yourself by how many friends you have online. You go out of your way to amass friends and that means people bend out of shape and become something they are not…

Mr Smallwood said the site was unsuitable for people recovering from drug, alcohol and shopping addictions. He said: ‘If you’re an addict you need to do things to fix yourself and make yourself feel better.

It’s an intriguing argument.  Facebook does seems addictive sometimes, but I am not sure the acquisition of friends is the most addictive aspect of it.  People who have very few friends can still find themselves whittling away hours and hours on the site.  Certain apps are more addictive than others, and it is often just the need to communicate itself that is addictive, even if no one is listening.

Innovative Practices for Challenging Times

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An message from Michael Nanfito and NITLE.

In March 2009, five exemplary projects from the liberal arts community received the NITLE Community Contribution Award, which includes an opportunity to publish a case study with Academic Commons. Today, I’m happy to announce the publication of “Innovative Practices for Challenging Times,” a new issue of Academic Commons that showcases these projects and gives readers a chance to find out how their leaders made them happen.

Articles featured in this issue of Academic Commons include:

“War News Radio” by Abdulla A. Mizead. Mizead tells how one creative alum, a group of dedicated students, and a supportive college community launched a new major reporting initiative covering the war zones in Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Come for the Content, Stay for the Community” by Ethan Benatan, Jezmynne Dene, Hilary Eppley, Margret Geselbracht, Elizabeth Jamieson, Adam Johnson, Barbara Reisner, Joanne Stewart, Lori Watson, and B. Scott Williams. Find out how a group of inorganic chemists used social networking technologies to build a scientific community for support, exchange of ideas, and friendship — all in the interest of improving chemistry education across campuses and having a bit of fun in the process.
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“Curricular Uses of Visual Material: A Research-Driven Process for Improving Institutional Sources of Curricular Support” by Andrea Lisa Nixon, Heather Tompkins, and Paula Lackie. When students work with visual materials in all parts of the curriculum, how do you make sure they get the technical support they need? An extensive research study of faculty and students led to a new coordinated support model. Nixon, Tompkins, and Lackie explain how they got it done.

“The History Engine: Doing History with Digital Tools” by Robert K. Nelson, Scott Nesbit, and Andrew Torget. The History Engine offers a rich digital repository of episodes from American history and even more important, a chance for undergraduates to “do history” long before the senior seminar or capstone course.

“The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project: A Case Study” by Ken Newquist. The Collaborative Liberal Arts Moodle Project, or CLAMP as it’s better known, proves the power of collaboration across campuses. By creating a network of Moodle users from multiple campuses across the country, CLAMP has developed a highly effective system for adapting the open-source software Moodle for the specific needs of liberal arts colleges.

At NITLE, we’re pleased to partner with Academic Commons to bring you these case studies and to enable their authors to share the knowledge they’ve developed along with their projects. We thank the featured authors and their partners for their work and Academic Commons for collaborating with us. If you would like to nominate a project for the next round of awards, please contact me at mnanfito@nitle.org by November 16, 2009.

Is Multitasking Making it Hard for You to Think?

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Read it and gloat. Last week, researchers at Stanford University published a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showing that the most persistent multitaskers perform badly in a variety of tasks. They don’t focus as well as non-multitaskers. They’re more distractible. They’re weaker at shifting from one task to another and at organizing information. They are, as a matter of fact, worse at multitasking than people who don’t ordinarily multitask.

You know what this means. This means that the people around you — the husband who’s tapping the computer keys during an important phone conversation with you, the S.U.V. driver with the grande latte and the cellphone, the dinner companion with the roving eye and twitching thumbs — are not only irritating, they are (let’s not be fainthearted) incompetent.

via The Mediocre Multitasker – NYTimes.com.

Ouch!  Leave it to the New York Times to put it so directly and sarcastically.  They are also exaggerating a bit.  The Standford study did not so so far as to find anyone incompetent.  Nonetheless, if other research backs the Stanford research up, it is disturbing stuff.  Basically what the study found was that people who multitask are not very good at it.  People who don’t do it regularly are better appear to do it better.

Even more strangely, regular multitasking seems to impact the multitaskers ability in a whole range of cognitive functions!  The research dealt with media multitaksers, i.e. people who have lots of windows open on their computer, say one for chat, one for browsing, etc., even as music is playing, or the tv is on.

(So what was I going to write next?  I forgot.  I had to answer an email and then the movie caught my attention for a bit.  Oh yeah, I was looking for a quotation from the article.)
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Eyal Ophir, the study’s lead investigator and a researcher at Stanford’s Communication Between Humans and Interactive Media Lab, said: “We kept looking for multitaskers’ advantages in this study. But we kept finding only disadvantages. We thought multitaskers were very much in control of information. It turns out, they were just getting it all confused.”

The study’s results were so strong and unexpected that the researchers are planning a series of follow-up experiments. “It keeps me up late at night,” Professor Nass said. “I worry about both the short-term and long-term effects of multitasking. We’re going to be testing the heck out of high and low multitaskers.”

To the rest of the world, though, the people who trudge through life excited and unnerved by an occasional cellphone call while walking or watching the sun set (isn’t that multitasking?), the study’s findings aren’t quite so shocking. A constant state of stress, deluges of ever-changing information, the frenzied, nanosecond-fast hustle and bustle — this is bad for you? It’s surprising and it’s news that it’s bad for you? Before they lie down to take a well-deserved and uninterrupted nap, the trudgers of the world would like to say, “We told you so!”

via The Mediocre Multitasker – NYTimes.com.

As a frequent, very frequent, multitasker, this is all scary stuff.

There is a more detailed report on the study on the Stanford University Web site.  Read the abstract and full study here.

70,000 Arab graduates migrate for overseas jobs annually

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Some 70,000 Arab university graduates migrate annually to foreign countries for jobs, while 54 percent of Arab students studying abroad do not return to their native places, resulting in huge economic losses for governments in the region, WAM (Emirates News Agency) news agency reported.

Arab countries, which make substantial investments for educating and training youths, lose over $1.5 billion due to migration of graduates for overseas jobs, while recipient countries exploit the refined talent without having to spend on education, a study conducted by Department of Population and Migration Policies of the 22-member Arab League said.

via 70,000 Arab graduates migrate for overseas jobs annually.

That quite a brain drain.  Apparently 70% of the scientist who go abroad to study don’t come back.  The rate is 50% among doctors and 23% among engineers.

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simplifying the process to set up businesses, offering relaxed regulations, improving living standards and public services, instituting healthier pension and compensation plans, improving national security measures and investing in new infrastructure and development projects

Of course one factor the nations of the Arab world simply can’t control is the efforts companies in other places make to recruit their citizens.  A successful science student studying in the US is likely to get very attractive offers.

Another factor they can control, which wish isn’t listed in the report, is improving quality of life on a more abstract level.  Too many of the countries in the Arab world heavily restrict freedom of expression, the right to privacy, freedom of assembly, freedom of religion, creative expression, who one associates with, the rights of women, etc. Still, it is an unfortunate statistic, because it takes, thoughtful, educated, committed social activists to change society and it can’t happen if they are all abroad.

I’m Not Ignoring You, I Swear!

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If you are a friend, family member or colleague who is reading this, and you are annoyed with or concerned about me because I have not responded to an email you sent at some point in the past month or so, please accept my apologies and don’t worry.

The spam filter I have installed on my computer, or rather HAD installed on my computer, seems to have gone berserk! I looked in the spam box today and found message from my colleagues, family and friends. It seems to have been totally arbitrary. This program, Intego Personal Antispam X5 for the record, has many of the standard filters. It can be configures to block mail from certain addresses, sent to certain addresses, on a blacklist of known spammers, on my personal blacklist, mail containing containing certain words, certain URLs, or displaying certain characteristics of spam.

But I had changed nothing in the configuration and yet it suddenly began filtering out mail from lists I subscribe to, colleagues who write me often, email reminders from iCal, etc. What confuses me is that is was selective. An email sent at 2:00 pm from my good friend jsmith@randomemail.com might have reached me, but John Smith’s email sent at 3:05 might not have. What happened in that hour and five minutes?
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Anyway, Personal Antispam is disabled, so if I missed your message, hopefully I’d find it now.

Bandwidth-guzzling iPhone called “Hummer of cellphones”

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I had wondered what was going on with tethering and MMS for the iPhone.  I kept hearing rumors that it was due for the fall.  But it looks like there are still significant network issues with AT&T.  I’ve certainly experienced some of the issues mentioned here.

While AT&T and Apple have remained silent on the absence of tethering and MMS with the iPhone, a new report provides insight on the effect an influx of bandwidth-heavy mobile users have had on the wireless network.

Digging into customer dissatisfaction with the AT&T network, The New York Times revealed that the carrier has struggled to keep up with demand as iPhone owners use more and more bandwidth. The report suggests that AT&T’s reputation could be tarnished because, for some users, its network is unable to keep up with demand. The bandwidth issues have led to delays of tethering and multimedia messaging, much-anticipated features for iPhone users.
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“The result is dropped calls, spotty service, delayed text and voice messages and glacial download speeds as AT&T’s cellular network strains to meet the demand,” the report, which compared the device to a gas-guzzling Hummer, states. “Another result is outraged customers.”

via AppleInsider | Bandwidth-guzzling iPhone called “Hummer of cellphones”.

Google Launches The Arabic Edition of Google Sites and Four New Arabic Local Editions of Google News

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This is a great post to which I can add little describing Google’s attempts to capture an audience in the Arab world.  These are the first two paragraphs, but read on at ArabCrunch

Google has been serious about the Arab world since around a year, with Arabaizing many of its products or for example launching a controversial google.ps domain for Palestine. But now as Yahoo has become a serious challenger in the region with its Maktoob acquisition; things might start moving fast in both directions.

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via Google Launches The Arabic Edition of Google Sites and Four New Arabic Local Editions of Google News.

The Wired Campus Asks, “Can Twitter Turn Students Into Better Writers?”

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As educators interested in how online tools can make students better writers, we are finally getting some systematic studies to back up anecdotal evidence about how the more widely used tools, blogs and Twitter, are impacting writing skills and the evidence so far is positively inconclusive.  That is the gist of an interesting post from Wired Campus today, which takes note of the contradictory conclusions drawn from two studies.

Mark Bauerlein, professor of English at Emory University, turned in a Brainstorm blog post on Saturday, August 29, 2009 arguing that while it is true that young people today write far more than any previous generation in the form of online postings, text messages and the like,

we don’t see any gains in reading comprehension for 17-year-olds on NAEP exams, the SAT, or the ACT.  The last NAEP writing exam showed some improvement at the very lowest end, but no improvement in “proficient” or “advanced.”  Remedial reading and writing course enrollments are heavy, and the Chronicle’s survey of college teachers found only six percent of them claiming that students are “very well prepared” in writing.  And businesses keep spending billions of dollars each year on remedial writing training for employees.

On the other hand, early results of five-year study from Stanford draw an opposite conclusion.  The study examined close to 14,000 pieces of student writing done for courses and beyond.
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Though final data analysis has not been done, early results indicated that in their Internet writings, students took pains to cultivate tone and voice, and to address a particular audience. “The out-of-class writing actually made them more conscious of the things writing teachers want them to think about,” said Paul M. Rogers, an assistant professor of English at George Mason University who is involved in the study.

So there you have it.  These are only two studies.  More have been done and more are being undertaken.  I am sure it will be a while before the debate is settled.

To my mind, however, a correlating, and perhaps even more important question, might be whether or not we are teaching students the right kind of writing.  In other words, is the nature of written discourse being so radically altered that we need to supplant or at least supplement teaching the forms and styles we teach now with newer forms and styles for the digital age?

Multitasking May Not Mean Higher Productivity

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Electronics and Multitasking I was listening to NPR on my way to the beach on Friday and I found myself wanting to stick my fingers in my ears and sing loudly, “La, la, la, la…,” so disturbing was what I was hearing.

It was a segment on Talk of the Nation, Science Friday August 28 that dealt with a study of multitasking.  Apparently people who think they are great at multitasking are not.  Apparently they are not only not good at multitasking, but their cognitive abilities are impaired in other areas as well.  At least that is what Clifford Nass from Stanford University found in the research he described on NPR’s Science Friday.

So the three abilities we looked at were – the first is filtering: the ability to ignore irrelevant information and focus on relevant information. And I had thought, more than my other two colleagues, that that was a particular gift that high multitaskers had. But in fact, multitaskers are suckers for distraction and suckers for the irrelevant, and so the more irrelevant information they see, the more they’re attracted to it.

The second ability is the ability to manage your working memory, keep it neatly organized, be able to – the way I usually think about it is, imagine having very neat filing cabinets where you carefully and quickly place things in the right cabinet, and when you need the information, you immediately know which filing cabinet to go to. They’re actually much worse at that.
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And finally, the biggest surprise to the two other authors of the study, Eyal Ophir and Anthony Wagner, the biggest surprise was that they’re even slower and worse at switching from one task to another. You would’ve thought that, at the very least, would be the key gift of multitaskers, but they’re actually worse.

As if that weren’t bad enough there seems to be some evidence that multitasking impairs other types of thought more generally.

I think the reason it’s so frightening is we actually didn’t study people while they were multitasking. We studied people who were chronic multitaskers, and even when we did not ask them to do anything close to the level of multitasking they were doing, their cognitive processes were impaired. So basically, they are worse at most of the kinds of thinking not only required for multitasking but what we generally think of as involving deep thought.

I don’t think of myself as particularly good at multitasking, but I do it a lot.  It seems like a necessity in today’s world.  So are we dumbing ourselves down?

NITLE – Internationalizing Curricula in the Sciences

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This is the description for a program I have organized to take place in our multipoint interactive videoconferencing system (Elluminate) on September 10.  I’m quite looking forward to it.  At the risk of sounding like a broken record, a global education is more important than ever, and technology provides is invaluable tools to help provide it, right across the curriculum.  Places were still available when last I checked, so if you are interested, more details and registration information is here.

While an understanding of ones place within a global community is increasingly considered a core value of a liberal arts education, students in the sciences are less likely to participate in study abroad programs and take fewer electives outside their major or related disciplines. The reasons for this are varied and complex, but the problem must be addressed. In this presentation Mark Stewart, chair of the department of psychology, Willamette University, and Stas Stavrianeas, professor of exercise science, Willamette University, will present their strategies for helping students better understand other cultures and increasing the number of students opting to pursue study abroad, strategies that rely heavily on increased ease of access to global media, interactivity of new technology and innovative pedagogical strategies.

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via NITLE – Internationalizing Curricula in the Sciences .