An agnotological analysis of APIs: or,disconnectivity and the ideological limits of our knowledge of social media

Adopting an agnotological perspective, this article extends the critical literature on APIs (application programing interfaces) by systematically showing that social media APIs are largely blind to acts of disconnectivity such as unfriending and unliking. We do this through analysis of the traces of social media usage that are not accessible through APIs as gleaned from the technical documentation published for developers by 12 major SNSs. Our findings make two main contributions. First, we show for the first time that APIs offer virtually no access to data about disconnectivity. Second, we show that APIs offer a very limited historical perspective, particularly regarding disconnectivity. However, for types of users that might spend money on advertising, far more historical and disconnectivity-oriented information is accessible through the API. This has practical consequences for research and contributes to an agnotology of social media that sheds critical light on the advertiser-friendly atmosphere of connectivity that social media try to create.     

利用“Facebook”发展网络学习社区

当高等教育机构都在宣传远程教育“一站式服务”特点的时候,他们并没有热衷于（至少在现阶段）把Facebook这样的工具加入他们的绑定服务。这些服务现在可以通过诸如Angel和Blackboard的课程管理系统（CMSs）实现。高等教育现在还没有准备好完全接纳CMSs。从理论上说,学生们在CMSs中可以更有效地学习。然而,其他的社会网络工具（如博客、维客和播客）显得要比Facebook更适合在远程教育中使用。要注意的是,对CMSs进行＂整合＂而不是＂代替＂是这一类工具现在唯一的功用。使用这一类网络工具的用户大部分都支持这一事实即Facebook能为大学生们提供一种社会出路。因为,不管它效果如何,社会交往总是人类教育的核心。在这一方面,Facebook会起到作用,但是把这一作用融入到远程教育中却缺少了一股推动力。学生们可以把它作为合作学习中次要的信息交流途径。例如：学生们可以通过在自己的空间中邀请同学来共同完成小组作业。Facebook提供的服务（如聊天、结识新同学、安排社会、学术会议等）可以通过使用CMSs当前的技术来实现,同时避免社会网络中普遍存在的安全漏洞和其他法律问题。目前对于Facebook应用在网络学习社区中的观念很可能一夜之间被颠覆,基于Facebook的新发展,技术融合以及远程教育管理者观念的改变,面对一些学生学习花费时间长的这一情况,Facebook改进了原来在推进学习（如完成任务花费的时间）中的功用。Facebook的引入可能使学习环境很舒适,但是笔者很想深刻的挖掘该技术,并探索将它用于学术领域的可能性,把它作为一种潜在的方式使学生可以远程互相学习而不用挤在一个狭小的空间。     

Unravelling Facebook: a pedagogical tool during the Syrian crisis

This paper aims to analyse the role of Facebook in academia during the Syrian crisis. Data were collected by means of an online survey from 726 students at Damascus University (Males = 446, Females = 280). Results indicated that Facebook facilitated communication and resource sharing in times of war and crisis where safe commuting posed a challenge for students. It served as an alternate trustworthy medium within the failure of the official web sites at Damascus University. The study suggests that Facebook is an effective pedagogical tool for countries going through crisis and war situations, and a promising educational tool that warrants further attention in underdeveloped and Arab countries in general.     

“I don’t see myself as a 40-year-old on Facebook”: medical students’ dilemmas in developing professionalism with social media

Students’ development of professionalism is vital within medical education, while social media communications can blur professional and personal boundaries. In the UK advice for medical practitioners and students has been developed, advocating care in the projection of a professional identity online as offline. This study takes an academic literacies approach to a small-scale investigation of attitudes and practices of second-year medical students in a British university through a focus group and paired interview, recognising that issues of identity and power are multi-layered and complex. Use of social media focuses primarily on Facebook, where they had already begun to adapt their self-presentation. Depictions of alcohol use are a particular area of concern. The students’ reflections demonstrate professionalism in respect of care for patient confidentiality and privacy. Yet they express an ambivalent sense of a future trajectory in which continuing social media use may appear simultaneously undesirable and yet vital. A finding of considerable concern is a reluctance to challenge inappropriate online behaviour despite policy guidelines. New generations growing up with social media raise challenges and opportunities for medical education that require greater attention and the development of participatory approaches to research, increasing understanding that in turn may be beneficial for policy-makers.     

Student teachers’ engagement in Facebook-assisted peer assessment in an initial teacher education context: speaking 2.0

Although peer assessment (PA) has been explored and implemented in higher education, little is known about how it is carried out through such a virtual platform as Facebook in an initial teacher education (ITE) context. To fill this practical void, this article showcases the brief portrait of Facebook-assisted PA in an English as a foreign language (EFL) classroom. This in-practice article shows how Facebook as an online platform serves as virtual engagement in PA among English student teachers in the EFL speaking classroom. This virtual engagement not only created an interactive virtual speaking classroom, but also it encouraged students to become critical reflective language learners.     

Ethical dilemmas on social media: Swedish secondary teachers’ boundary management on Facebook

With the aim of contributing to the research about the educational use of social media, the paper explores teachers’ experiences of ethical dilemmas on Facebook. The paper draws upon focus group interviews with Swedish secondary teachers. Two main categories of ethical dilemmas, related to the border between private and professional, are detected. The dilemmas concern (1) teachers’ moral responsibility for pupils’ actions and (2) how teachers appear on social media. Different boundary work practices created and used by teachers are identified. The main conclusion is that, by having contact with pupils in a virtual social arena originally intended for private use, teachers’ use of social media brings to fore and intensifies deep-rooted ethical questions about what the teacher role is and should be. Teachers’ participation on social media such as Facebook compels them to reflect upon and position their preferred teacher role in these new social arenas.     

A Qualitative Investigation of College Students' Facebook Usage and Romantic Relationships: Implications for College Counselors

The use of social media is a societal trend influencing the way that individuals communicate with and relate to one another. Moreover, Facebook use may facilitate or hinder individuals' relationship growth and development. The purpose of this article is to (a) review research examining Facebook usage and interpersonal relationships, (b) present qualitative insight into the Facebook experiences of college students (N = 16) from a large southeastern university, and (c) offer implications for college counselors.     

Literacy as social (media) practice: Refugee youth and native language literacy at school

Research indicates that immigrant and refugee students benefit from use of their native languages in education. Nevertheless, what this means in practice has infrequently been examined by researchers, and teachers often struggle to find ways to use their refugee students’ native languages as resources that encourage the development of the native languages as well as academic language and literacy in the new language. This small-scale, exploratory project employed an innovative, five-day critical media literacy curricular unit, and then examined how it served as a context for native language and English literacy development. Participants were 14 adolescent newcomers to the U.S. from Somalia, Kenya, Djibouti, and Ethiopia, all speakers of Somali with limited or interrupted formal schooling experiences. Participants had varying but mostly beginning levels of print literacy skills; yet as recent migrants, most used social media to interact with others locally and globally, in multiple languages, oral and written. As described here, our efforts to foster peer-to-peer Somali language communication resulted in multilingual interaction across a range of social and academic purposes in the classroom. These research findings highlight how in-class use of social media analysis can serve to achieve multilingual and (critical) literacy learning aims.     

College Students’ Positive Strategic SNS Involvement and Stress Coping in the United States and China

Based on a self-administered online survey of undergraduate students, this study aimed to explore college students’ social media involvement in relation to their stress coping in the United States and China. A total of 262 survey responses were received from American participants and 265 survey responses were received from Chinese participants. Results indicated that American student users’ positive strategic social networking sites (SNS) involvement to a certain extent assisted in their adaptive coping with stress. However, the positive effect of positive strategic SNS involvement was not found as an adaptive coping strategy among Chinese student respondents. In addition, perceived support from friends on Facebook was the key mediator of positive strategic SNS involvement and adaptive coping for U.S. students.     

Social Media Followership as a Predictor of News Website Traffic

ABSTRACT

News organizations increasingly focus their efforts to boost traffic on their websites to grow their share of online advertising. We investigated the relationship between news websites’ traffic ranking and their social media tools of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Google Plus. For a year we monitored the followers of all Greek regional newspapers in relation to the traffic on their websites. We continued monitoring for a second year to validate the robustness of the findings and we hereby present results for 86 weeks. Statistical analysis leads to the conclusion that the number of social media subscribers can predict the competitive position of a newspaper in the market based on its website traffic. The effect lasts for a limited period of time, one to three weeks, depending on the specific medium. Importantly, results indicate the potential of developing a prediction model of the website’s traffic, based on the social media metrics of the organization, as a useful tool to increase traffic and revenues from online advertising.