Category: Social-Networking
October 8, 2010, 03:38 PM ET
Location-Based Apps Add Virtual Dimension to Campus Maps
Colleges have embraced mobile location-based applications to get current and prospective students engaged with their surroundings—and each other.
Previously just for broadcasting user locations, popular GPS-driven applications like Foursquare, SCVNGR, and Facebook Places are being adapted to add a virtual dimension to everyday student life and campus events like freshman orientations and alumni weekends. Rather than simply viewing static maps on their smartphone screens, students can now join virtual scavenger hunts, access location-specific pictures and video, and win prizes for checking in at campus hotspots.
"Universities in general are more into social media than businesses because social media is such a great community builder," said Christina Dorobek, university specialist at application developer SCVNGR. "It was a market that we thought was really important to reach out to."...
Read MoreOctober 6, 2010, 04:05 PM ET
Colleges Build Hubs to Track Social-Media Buzz About Their Institutions
Colleges are increasingly sending out announcements on Twitter, Facebook, and other social-media services, hoping to build a positive buzz about the institution and keep people informed. As the list of departments and officials adopting the services grows, some institutions are building Web sites that aggregate college-related social media in one place.
A Twitter aggregator at North Carolina State University, for instance, features an up-to-the-minute feed of tweets coming from 95 different university Twitter accounts, including from academic departments, alumni associations, and dining halls. "The voice of the university was through all of these separate Twitter accounts," said application developer Jason Austin. "What we did was look at how we could leverage that to promote the university and promote these individual Twitter accounts."
In addition to collecting tweets from across...
Read MoreOctober 4, 2010, 06:20 PM ET
The Future of Social-Media Archiving
The Archiving Social Media conference at George Mason University brought scholars, archivists, and Web developers together on Friday to discuss the preservation of data now whizzing around the Internet on blogs and networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.
Demand for Web archives has grown as social media has become part of the fabric of social history. At the conference, participants talked about the challenge of documenting social media from a variety of angles, such as copyright, ethics, and how the archives will be used.
"This was really intended as a first conversation," said Tom Scheinfeldt, managing director of George Mason's Center for History and New Media, and a research assistant professor of history at GMU. "We have a better sense of the kind of work that would need to be done."
Mr. Scheinfeldt said the conference was inspired by the impact that social media has had in...
Read MoreSeptember 29, 2010, 06:19 PM ET
CUNY Social Network Mixes Scholarship With Facebook-Style Friendship
The City University of New York is turning to social networking to help foster academic discussion and camaraderie across its 23 campuses with its new Academic Commons site.
The CUNY-only network allows faculty, graduate students, and staff to write and share blogs, join subject groups, and participate in academic discussions. "We're trying to create a kind of online virtual community that is open and organic in its nature," said Academic Commons director Matthew Gold.
Registered members of Academic Commons get their own publicly accessible profile, where they can post information about themselves and link up with friends online. The site also allows users to create and join groups, where they can post to a common message board, share files, and collaborate on wikis. Groups range from open-source publishing and graduate admissions to educational games and New York pizza joints. "It...
Read MoreSeptember 16, 2010, 05:50 PM ET
U. of Kentucky Hopes Facebook Places Sparks Campus-Privacy Conversation
The University of Kentucky is hopping on the geotagging
bandwagon, with a new Facebook Places initiative that the
institution hopes will start a campus discussion about online
privacy.
Facebook Places is a feature that allows registered users to reveal their real-life location by smartphone or laptop, which then appears in their status to all their “friends.” The concept doesn’t stray far from predecessors Gowalla and Foursquare, well, besides Facebook's 500-million-plus users worldwide.
Kelley Bozeman, Kentucky's director of marketing, said the social network’s wide appeal is what prompted her to launch a campaign just days after the popular site announced the feature—at the same time the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California released a statement criticizing it for overlooking potential privacy problems.
Now, six wooden pointers resembling the Places logo are...
Read MoreAugust 11, 2010, 04:38 PM ET
Colleges Use Facebook to Let Freshmen Find Their Own Roommates
This summer, incoming freshmen at five universities can use a Facebook application to find their roommates. Students can use the application, RoomBug, to fill out forms about their preferences for living and qualities they'd like to see in a roommate. Students can then request a match, which the other incoming freshman must confirm.
RoomBug is hardly the first service to let students match themselves: Tulane University announced a partnership with online service RoommateClick two years ago.
But RoomBug, which the company U-Match LLC just rolled out at Emory University, the University of Florida, Temple University, Wichita State University, and William Paterson University of New Jersey, tries to go where the students are.
"Everyone is on Facebook," says Robert Castellucci, the service's co-founder and sales director.
Over a quarter of the University of Florida's incoming freshmen have...
Read MoreJuly 29, 2010, 04:10 PM ET
Who Cares About Facebook Privacy? Students Do
Think students don't care about online privacy? Think again, say two researchers who have published a new paper about the privacy attitudes of 18- and 19-year-olds.
The researchers, Danah Boyd and Eszter Hargittai, report that most Facebook users modified their privacy settings at least once in 2009 and that "engagement with privacy settings increased significantly" between 2009 and 2010.
"Over all, our data show that far from being nonchalant and unconcerned about privacy matters, the majority of young adult users of Facebook are engaged with managing their privacy settings on the site at least to some extent," the researchers write.
Ms. Boyd, a researcher at Microsoft Research, and Ms. Hargittai, an associate professor in the communication-studies department at Northwestern University, base their findings on surveys of students at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Their paper...
Read MoreJune 18, 2010, 03:00 PM ET
Beer Makes Grading Easier, Says Facebook
Our colleagues on Tweed have noticed that even after much-publicized gaffes, some faculty members on Facebook have not enhanced their privacy settings. And this lets the world see a few off-the-cuff remarks on grading techniques as the semester rushes to an end. "Flag Brew IPA ... makes grading papers a little more bearable," says someone. (Tweed, sensitive to privacy, has redacted identities.) "Chances are you will get an A if your paper is in the last 10 [that the professor] grades," notes another.
But maybe this isn't such a big deal, says a Tweed commenter: "As a society are we really so uptight that A. people can't be tired and express it or B. joke about what they're doing?"
May 19, 2010, 12:00 PM ET
Google Wave Has Officially Opened Its Doors
Google Wave has switched from an invitation-only offering to one open to all interested users, the popular service announced Wednesday.
Google also announced a batch of special features and tweaks to Google Wave, which allows real-time communication online. Google introduced the project in May 2009 and put out a limited preview release in November. Some educational institutions have used the service as a way to do collaborative work more efficiently.
Gregory D'Alesandre, product manager at Google, said one of the biggest changes users are likely to notice is more user-friendliness, so that new users can adapt quickly to the service. Google Wave plans more changes meant to cater to new users in coming months, although Mr. D'Alesandre declined to give specifics.
Google Apps domain administrators at universities and businesses will now be able to enable Google Wave for all their users....
Read MoreMay 18, 2010, 02:00 PM ET
Students at U. of Florida Use Facebook to Find Tutors
At the University of Florida, a Facebook application lets students be choosy when looking for tutors.
The application, Tutor Matching Service, lets students search for tutors by subject, class, or tutor name. They can see ratings and comments on tutors, when tutors are available, and how much they charge. Tutors can also post pictures and videos of themselves.
A little more than a year ago, the student-government president at the time created the application with Group Interactive Networks, a technology company, to supplement the university's on-campus tutoring center. Though the center offers free tutoring to students, it has limited hours, does not have tutors for every class, and offers no information on the quality of tutors.
More than 120 students have registered as tutors on the application, and when class is in session, 50 to 100 hours of tutoring are arranged through it each...
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