what the researchers found was that follower count alone is not necessarily a worthy measure of determining influence. Other factors come into play as well. Although some heavily-followed accounts are also mentioned and retweeted a lot, just looking at audience size doesn't reveal an account's ability to influence and impact the Twitter universe.
Because we share similar types of students, faculty, size and mission, we implicitly realized that we were all aiming for the same outcomes for our students, which we did not then need to elaborate on. We have since shared materials with one another in the hopes of strengthening our own programs and each other's.
Along the same lines, I am able to receive encouragement, support, and constructive criticism on the papers I present. There are too many horror stories of young professors and even graduate students who have been flayed by the questioning at national conferences.
Raw Power bombed on its release, but it has since been acknowledged as one of the most influential records in rock history. For the last few decades, however, the man who gave Raw Power its air of menace has been something of a mystery. James Williamson joined the Stooges in 1971, when they were at their lowest ebb after two commercially disastrous albums and the development of serious drug habits. Photographs of Williamson at the time depict a dark, brooding presence; a juvenile delinquent in platform boots. When he disappeared from view in 1977 it was assumed he had either died of a heroin overdose or gone off the rails entirely.
Blogs are great for getting people to a site. Twitter is great for tossing around short-form ideas and quips. Facebook is great for talking with a defined community.
But blogs are not inherently social. They try to be, with comments and RSS, but they're still built in silos. Twitter is unbelievably social, no doubt about that, but it's also shorthand. It's very hard to have an engaging conversation in 140 characters. And Facebook is like a ping-pong match: lots of back and forth excitement, but very little substance.
Buzz could be the missing link here.
Without any reservation, I can say that I ended up writing this blog because of those first connections that I made online in the early 1990s. Online discussion led to new jobs, new teaching opportunities, and new ways to support other teachers using online tools.
Literacy has never been a single monolithic skill. It involves both reading and writing, and these two skills are independent of each other. More to the point, literacy involves reading and writing differently in a range of situations. You may consider yourself literate because you have read Shakespeare, or because you can write a coherent quarterly report. But you don't write your quarterly report as a sonnet. Different forms of literacy apply at different times, and people can be good at some kinds of literacy while needing assistance in others.
Basic decoding (reading) and writing are rarely the problem in these misunderstandings. While many comments left by strangers on the threads I have studied are misspelled, use bad grammar, or are written in all-caps (or, even more confusingly, All Initial Caps), plenty can't be distinguished from the comments left by tech-savvy commenters when it comes to writing skill.
In fact, "strangers" are more likely than natives to write their comments in ways we all learned in school. In most of the threads I have studied, they make it clear who they are addressing ("Dear Facebook,") who is writing ("Thanks, Linda") and even how to understand where they are coming from geographically. They do this to the point of redundancy, sometimes entering this information into more than one comment field.
Norms are changing, with confidentiality giving way to openness. Participating in YouTube, Loopt, FriendFeed, Flickr, and other elements of modern digital society means giving up some privacy, yet millions of people are willing to make that trade-off every day. Of people with an online profile, nearly 40 percent have disabled privacy settings so anyone may view it, according to a Pew Internet survey released a year ago. The percentage is probably higher today.
In social networks, people can increase their defenses against identification by adopting tight privacy controls on information in personal profiles. Yet an individual’s actions, researchers say, are rarely enough to protect privacy in the interconnected world of the Internet.
You may not disclose personal information, but your online friends and colleagues may do it for you, referring to your school or employer, gender, location and interests. Patterns of social communication, researchers say, are revealing.
“Personal privacy is no longer an individual thing,” said Harold Abelson, the computer science professor at M.I.T. “In today’s online world, what your mother told you is true, only more so: people really can judge you by your friends.”
Collected together, the pool of information about each individual can form a distinctive “social signature,”
The patterns of collaboration between Wikipedia contributors have a direct effect on the data quality of an article, according to a new paper co-authored by a University of Arizona professor and graduate student.
With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content - whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else - as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own.
“Who owns the words?” Mr. Shields asks in a passage that is itself an unacknowledged reworking of remarks by the cyberpunk author William Gibson. “Who owns the music and the rest of our culture? We do — all of us — though not all of us know it yet. Reality cannot be copyrighted.”
Mr. Shields’s pasted-together book and defense of appropriation underscore the contentious issues of copyright, intellectual property and plagiarism that have become prominent in a world in which the Internet makes copying and recycling as simple as pressing a couple of buttons. In fact, the dynamics of the Web, as the artist and computer scientist Jaron Lanier observes in another new book, are encouraging “authors, journalists, musicians and artists” to “treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.”
