technology, education and training from an industrial/organizational (I/O) psychologist
My mission: I want to develop a freely available, NSF-funded, open source online social networking platform customized to the needs of university faculty and students.
I began today by drafting a comment response to this article by Rey Junco about “why educators must become hackers,” but after I started writing, it became obvious that this deserved a much more complete response.
I am normally a fan of articles from Mashable, but a recent article by Sharlyn Lauby on Foursquare’s use in the workplace struck me as absolutely ridiculous.
Inside Higher Ed discusses the results found by a survey conducted by Pearson on faculty use of social media. The results are pretty surprising.
In the first paper I’ve seen using social media (like Twitter) to tie to a real world monetary outcome, Asur and Huberman (2010) at the Social Computing Labs in Palo Alto, CA use Twitter activity to predict film box office sales. Taking all 24 major film releases between November 2009 and January 2010, the number of tweets on new films predict sales even better than the Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX), an online prediction game (think fantasy football for film success) that is described as the “gold standard” for predicting box office revenues.
Reports have been surfacing recently claiming Facebook usage enables the spread of syphilis. This is mostly based on irresponsible reporting.