Analyze your social world with Wolfram Connection

Regular Facebook users know that we all share a lot of information on the site.  But how much information?  How often are we online sharing our locations, communicating our feelings and responding to friends?  With a new Facebook app called Wolfram Connection, Facebook users can find out for themselves.  Before you jump into this, be warned.  The reports are not for the faint of heart.  If you’re mildly concerned about your online privacy and how Facebook uses information, the Wolfram Connection app will keep you up tonight.  If you’re just a curious person, it can give some important information about your Facebook usage and your network of friends.   While it can be scary, I encourage others to complete a Wolfram Connection report.  It can give you a great deal of information to help guide your social networking usage.  Consider it a detailed physical of your online social health.

Here are some interesting things I learned after using the app:

1.  I’m probably on Facebook way too much.  The Wolfram app says I’ve posted 425 comments and updates since January 1, 2011.  After looking at a report of the times I’ve posted, I find an even distribution of times and days during the week.  There are clearly those sleepless nights when I’m posting stuff at 3 AM and other nights where I’m commenting at 10 PM.  Not surprisingly, Tuesdays (the days I share new posts from the 8 Blog) are my most active days.

2.  My Facebook world is not really that diverse.  While I have a few friends in other countries, most of my Facebook connections are limited to 17 states. The vast majority (78%) live in the same state that I do.  This is pretty logical since I’ve spent my entire adult life going to school and working in the same state.  While I’ve traveled elsewhere, few connections are apparent on Facebook from these interactions.

3.  My social worlds rarely collide on Facebook.  Looking at a breakdown of my friend connections (at the right), my different social worlds are clear.  I have a social group from college, from graduate school, from my workplace, and from my family.  The nest of connections rarely overlap.  I don’t know if this is common for others  but few of my Facebook friends connect to more than one grouping. I can also see a few outliers who are not friends with anyone else in my social network except for me.

4.  Not all of my friends are sharing their information or reporting it accurately.  In one of my reports, it showed that a friend was 92 years old.  He is not.  It also showed half of my friends consider themselves Conservatives and the other half consider themselves Libertarians.  Of course, only 2 people out of my entire friend network chose to share their political views.  While the report shows that 81% of my friends are “married,” only about half of my friends report their relationship status at all.  It’s good to know that people are willing to keep some of their information private.  Possibly with a detailed analysis from Wolfram Connection, Facebook users can better understand their social connections and make informed changes about how they participate and what information they choose to share.

Facebook introduces Groups for Schools

In their 2011 National Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, Educause reported that 90% of undergraduates use Facebook and 58% of undergraduates use the site several times a day.  For those of you familiar with Facebook’s history, this makes sense.  Facebook was created by a few creative college students so that could interact with one another.  In the beginning days of Facebook’s existence, someone needed a college email address to even join the site.   Eventually, people outside of academic environments were allowed in and the site exploded into the multi-billion dollar company that it is today. The site now has over 850 million active users and is available in over 70 languages.

Last week, however, Facebook went back to its roots by announcing Groups for Schools.  With Groups for Schools, students and faculty members at collegiate institutions can create groups to allow interaction and collaboration.  Groups for Schools will allow members to create events, message other members and stay up-to-date on what’s happening around campus.  The most interesting feature is a new file sharing option that isn’t currently available in the Facebook architecture.    With the Files option, members can share lecture notes, assignments, schedules and many other file types with other members of a school group. Anyone in a school group can upload and download files (up to 25 Mb) within that group.  Even though the file size is relatively small, I expect many school organizations to use the Groups for Schools feature mainly to tap into the cloud storage for their members.  It’s like Dropbox has come to Facebook!

For those of you who might be interested in using Groups for Schools, Facebook offers three kinds of school groups with different levels of privacy and sharing options.

• Open: Anyone can see an open group, and who’s in it. Members of the school community can also see or post updates, photos, files and events shared within the group.
• Closed: Anyone can see a closed group, and who’s in it. Only members of a closed group can see or post updates, photos, events and files.
• Secret: Only members of a secret group can see the group, who’s in it and what members post and share.

While some people may be concerned that students could create a “secret” group to share information and files, I think the option will be helpful for school organizations who are trying to plan events and share materials without worrying about non-members’ interaction.  Before getting too excited about creating groups for your institution though, I suggest checking the Facebook Groups for Schools page to see if the feature is available for your institution yet.

BYOD Concerns: Education vs. Prohibition

One innovation that is sweeping American institutions of learning is the BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement.  The reasons are compelling.  Instead of schools and universities purchasing expensive technology and paying for its upkeep, individual students simply use the devices that they already have.  A recent ECAR survey reports that over half of collegiate students now own smartphones and over 85% own laptop computers.  Simply allowing students to use the devices they already own reduces the financial burden to schools.  It also allows students to use those devices with which they are already comfortable.  Many students customize the look and feel of their computers and phones to suit the needs.  Schools that embrace BYOD recognize the importance of individualized technological experiences for students.  BYOD schools also recognize the power that these technologies can have on learning.  Educators can use affordable student response systems like iClicker or PollEverywhere to engage and assess their students.  Additionally, through increased academic use, students will better understand how to use devices they already own as tools for learning.

When schools embrace BYOD, however, new challenges emerge.  For instance, a recent study by Junco & Cotten shows that multitasking during schoolwork can a strong negative impact on a collegiate student’s GPA.  While activities like Google searching during schoolwork do not significantly impact a student’s GPA, the study shows that using Facebook and Twitter does.  This study provides empirical evidence for what many educators already know:  Students can’t be updating their Facebook statuses or Tweeting when they’re trying to study and be successful students.  The study also reinforces work by Wood and her colleagues that showed the negative impact that off-task multi-tasking during classroom lessons could have on student performance.

These studies provide some interesting obstacles for those of us advocating for the BYOD movement.  With students using their own devices, isn’t there a greater likelihood that they’ll be tempted to check their Facebook page or their Twitter feed during classtime?  Don’t these research studies show the BYOD is doomed and we should just ban students’ distracting technologies from our classrooms?  While some may argue that the studies would support a prohibition of technology from our classroom, I tend to read the research more broadly.  The studies absolutely show that technologies can have negative impact on student performance. But examined collectively, the studies also show that students will be distracted from their schoolwork whether they’re in our classrooms or not.  We can’t ban technologies from their lives completely.  It’s really an age old challenge that parents, educators, and politicians (and others) find themselves facing time and time again:  Education vs. Prohibition.  Do we ban soft drinks and sweets completely or do we teach children to balance their diets?  Do we ban certain types of literature or do we teach readers the value of great literature?  Do we ban sites like Wikipedia completely or do we teach students how to critically analyze information and vet sources? Do we ban distracting technologies or teach students how to better manage their technical lives so they’re less distracted?

I believe we need to educate students about appropriate use of technology and show students that they will be more productive and more engaged when they focus on a single task without the distractions from Facebook and Twitter.  This is a 21st Century life skill that will help them be better students, but it will also help them be more attentive friends, partners and parents.

More communication options with extras in Google Hangouts

Google continues to develop it’s social networking platform (Google+) by adding a bunch of new features to make the tool more social and collaborative.  This week, I thought I’d outline some of the new features and how the features can be used in education.  While some people may be happy to hear that Google has recently added games like Angry Birds to the Google+ plaform, I’m really excited that they’ve incorporated more communication and collaboration options in Hangouts.  For those of you who might not know, Hangouts is Google+’s collaboration commons area.  With this tool, a Google+ user can create a Hangout and invite some friends.  Inside the Hangout, the group can chat, video chat and watch Youtube videos together.  A Hangout can support up to 10 friends simultaneously, which rivals sites like Skype.  When Google+ first came out, I thought the Hangouts feature was really promising and hoped they would expand its collaboration ability by adding connectivity to Google Docs.  I figured it was a natural progression to the site and would allow the Hangout to be more work related and less of a place to …. hang out.

Google+ has added Google Docs connectivity (and several other features) be releasing a “Hangouts with Extras” option which can expand the ways we interact with another and with our students.  Imagine you want to meet with a group of students online.  If all of the students are on Google+, you can invite them to a Hangout, open a file from Google Docs and the group can edit the document together.  This would be great for groups who are writing a paper together or collaborating on a group project.  A teacher could also use this feature to lead small group lessons by pulling presentation slides from Google Docs.  The teacher could also let students give their presentations to the rest of the group in the Hangout or use the slides as a means for displaying artwork for critique.

My only real reservation with the Google Docs feature is that individual users control what they see in their Hangout. Even though  I can share a presentation with an entire group of students in a Hangout, each student individually would need to view the presentation and advance the slides on their own.  This is hardly ideal and would create some confusion with students undoubtedly being on different slides or advancing the presentation at different rates. I was, however, able to use another new feature (screen sharing) to conduct a presentation that was a little more pedagogically sound.  With screen sharing, a user can replace their video feed with any window on their computer.  This would be great for demonstrating some computer function, showing some website, walking through manipulating some file or for conducting a presentation.  To show a presentation, I opened a Google Doc slideshow in a new window and then chose “screen sharing” which displayed the presentation to everyone in the Hangout.  While they could no longer see me (my video feed was replaced by the presentation), they could still hear me as I advanced through the slides.  While this functionality is certainly available in a bunch of commercial course tools (Eluminate, Wimba, etc), Google+ is a free resource and is available to a wider audience.  In fact, Google+ has appropriated some other features from commercial synchronous course tools that would be helpful.  For instance, you can now invite people into a Hangout by calling their phone number, which would be great for bringing guest speakers into an online class or for involving students in an online discussion who might not be near a computer.  Besides these features, Hangouts also offers a collaborative Sketchpad and a Notes page.  All of these extra options are only available when you click “Hangouts with extras” when you log in.  Used in concert, however, these “extra” Hangout tools can allow us to create productive learning environments for our students, even when we interact and teach online.

Social learning with Google Plus?

I need to start by saying that I haven’t been one of the lucky ones.  I haven’t actually received my Google+ invite yet (although I know several people have invited me).  Google has been experiencing tons of issues with meeting the demand of Google+ so they stopped sending invitations last week.  So, most of this post comes from checking out Google+ videos (which I’ve included), reading about Google+ and checking out reviews from others.  For those of you who are not spending your summer months tuned to the happenings of the technological world, Google+ is a new social networking platform that was released a few weeks ago.  I know that many educators are reluctant to use social networking with their students for one reason or another but I think some of the features in Google+ might convince the naysayers.  In this post, I’ll share my thoughts of some of the most promising features and how I see those features being used educationally.  To get a sense of what Google+ offers, however, take a quick look at this overview video.

Circles:  One of the most promising features is Circles.  With Circles, Google+ users can designate different groups of people (called circles) and share different items with those Circles.  With Facebook, most of the information people share is with all of their “friends.”  For instance, if I just wanted to send out a status update on Facebook for a group of students, I couldn’t do this easily.   This is one of the reasons that many educators avoid Facebook completely or create separate professional and social Facebook accounts. With Google+, however, I can create Circles for different classes and share different posts with the different classes.  I can even create separate Circles for my friends and share more personal information with them.

Hangouts:  Hangouts are billed as impromptu get-togethers online with the people in your Circles on Google+.  The real value with Hangouts is that they occur through video and each Hangout can handle up to 10 people.  A few weeks ago, I reviewed different video conferencing options and I am optimistic that ultimately Hangouts will be able to compete with all of them.  While Hangouts doesn’t seem to support screen sharing or offer any presentation options, it will allow educators to hold online office hours with groups of students and conduct synchronous discussions with them.  Students could also use Hangouts to meet outside of the classroom to work on group projects.  Integration with Google Docs would be a real plus, but maybe I’m asking for too much.

Sparks:  Google+ says that Sparks allows users to “nerd out, together.”  Imagine you’re doing some work online and you come across something (a website, a journal article, etc) that you’d love to share with a group of colleagues or with the students in one of your classes.  With Sparks, you can share that information with a specific Circle and track the conversation that ensues.  Sparks would be a perfect feature for fostering discussions amongst students in an online class.

Instant Update:  The world is becoming more mobile and so should our classrooms.  Google+ has loads of mobility options with apps planned for most phones and mobile devices.  With Instant Update, unlimited photos and videos can be uploaded instantly to your Google+ account and shared with specific Circles.  While the iOS app is not yet available for iPhones and iPods, I envision students in an English class producing digital stories on their iPads and uploading them to share with their classmates through Google+.  Or students in a Biology class capturing photos of wildlife out in the field on an iPod Touch and sharing them with the class.  The mobile options with Google+ are really exciting but Instant Update offers some great sharing options with photos and video.