Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

Grades don’t drop for college Facebook fiends

Posted on July 16th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

Students who use social networking sites don’t seem to suffer academically, according to research out of Northwestern University. In a recent paper titled “Predictors and consequences of differentiated practices on social network sites,” researchers found that heavy use of sites like Facebook and MySpace doesn’t affect college students’ grade point averages. In fact, it’s the usual suspects such as gender, ethnic background, and parental education that appear to have more of a determining factor in GPA than any kind of Facebook addiction.

According to the researchers’ data, female students tend to have higher grades than male ones, and white students have higher grades than non-Hispanic African-American students. Students whose parents have college degrees have higher GPAs than those whose parents only have a high school diploma or lower.

The researchers then added in data about overall Internet use and social networking use, and found that there were no significant differences. “The most prevalent findings… are the persisting differences between respondents with different demographic backgrounds,” reads the paper.

Indeed, Internet and social network use didn’t affect the difference in GPAs between male and female or white and African American students. However, social network use did eliminate the difference in GPAs between students whose parents had differing levels of higher education. In fact, when controlling for certain demographics, the researchers found a positive relationship between Internet use and GPA.

“The positive relationship between web-use skills and GPA may illustrate that students who have better online skills can draw on their Internet savvy to aid in their schoolwork,” wrote the researchers. “[E]ngaging more intensely with [social networking sites], in particular, shows no relationship to our outcome variable of academic achievement.”

The researchers do acknowledge that students are perfectly capable of distracting themselves from their schoolwork and wasting time online. However, the positive effects seem to outweigh the negative ones for some students, or at least cancel each other out for others. So, the next time your mom accuses you of spending more time online than on your freshman projects, tell her you’re just connecting with your peers for better project collaboration.

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Read the original post on Ars Technica

 

FastCompany Builds Them Up, Then Knocks Facebook Down

Posted on June 6th, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • 3 Comments

Ideas magazine can’t seem to make up its mind about leading social network.

Read the original post on PSFK

 

Understanding the latest Facebook privacy train wreck

Posted on May 23rd, 2010 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

Facebook’s latest privacy problem should raise a few eyebrows. Facebook sharing “private” data in unexpected (and occasionally unwelcome) ways is nothing new, but this newest problem is unusual, in that it does something that Facebook’s lengthy (and oft-updated) privacy policy explicitly says should not happen: it shares private user information with advertisers.

The research originally describing the problem looked at more than just Facebook. Many social networking sites, including LinkedIn, Digg, and Twitter, suffered the same leakage of personal data. Of the twelve sites looked at by the researchers, the only one that didn’t leak data to advertisers was the one already owned by an advertising company—Orkut.

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Read the original post on Ars Technica

 

Briefly Connected

Posted on April 18th, 2009 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

Here’s a quick outline of the online tools I’m currently using. I’ve started, stopped, wiped out, and started this blog several times over the course of about 4 years. Don’t think that means that I’ve figured out the perfect toolset or that I even have a real handle on what this blog is about. It’s still very much about my online life in the sense that I collect things and share them here online, some found, and some created. I’m not here to provide an authoritarian voice about the Web, but I am here to share some, just some, of the things I find of interest.

While I have a couple of dozen accounts for online services, many of them were created just to try them out and are now lingering. How many millions of account profiles are out there not being used? So here’s a list of my primary online services and how I’m using them.

Wordpress
- Blog where I post items I want to share, and use as a record for a later date.

Zemanta

- The Zemanta plugin for Wordpress suggest images, tags, links, and related posts. I can write a couple of sentances and Zemanta will recommend images, tags, etc., helping round out the context of my topic.

Flickr
- Photos I want to share publicly. The Zemanta plugin will find recommendations here within my Flickr photos as well as photos from other sources.

Twitter
- I have two accounts on Twitter, which I suspect will become one account soon. @mediarosa with over 2,000 friends currently, and @Jamie_T which I limit to friends and family and to feed my Facebook status. See Hootsuite and Twitter to Facebook below to see how that works.

Facebook
- Yeah, the obligatory Facebook page, with a schizophrenic mix of friends, family, and work related connections.

Hootsuite
I use hootsuite to post to both of my Twitter accounts and to shorten URL’s. Hootsuite also pulls from the rss feed on mediarosa.com to create a new Tweet.

Twitter to Facebook
- This Facebook application takes my Twitter updates from @Jamie_T and re-posts them as my Facebook status updates.

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Toolbars for everyone!

Posted on April 12th, 2009 • Filed under mediarosa • No Comments

I’ve had opportunity to try out Conduit.com to create a toolbar for a client. Conduit’s toolbar is easy to assemble, just create an account and select which features you want to add. RSS feeds, an email notifier, and weather are a couple of the items I started with. Now that I’ve lived with my sample toolbar for a couple of weeks I’m hooked on the convenience – not that toolbar’s are new to my browsing habits – in fact, I’m very fond of the Facebook toolbar. But what I’m thinking is, why not make a toolbar just for me?

While the intention of Conduit, and others like them, is to create a toolbar for mass distribution to your audience, I may just build one for myself. Just me. That may be a side effect of making it so easy to build. Everyone can build their own, custom, personalized browser toolbar because they make it so easy. Toolbars for everyone!

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