Social Media Research

PhD thesis (completed in January 2011) written in German:

"This doctoral thesis deals with the methodological approach of Blended Learning (i.e. mixing regular lesssons with E-Learning sequences) in foreign language lessons by using the learning management system Moodle. Providing practical examples taken from Italian lessons (upper secondary level) in a Viennese grammar school, it will be tried to explicitly emphasize the advantages and efficiency of Blended Learning for foreign language lessons. Nevertheless, obvious obstacles and problems concerning the application of this method will be discussed."

The PEW report titled "Social networking sites and our lives. How people’s trust, personal relationships, and civic and political involvement are connected to their use of social networking sites and other technologies." comes to an interesting conclusion:

"However, total network size may not be as important as other factors – such as intimacy. Americans have more close social ties than they did two years ago. And they are less socially isolated. We found that the frequent use of Facebook is associated with having more overall close ties."

Here's the link: http://www.pewinternet.org/~/media//Files/Reports/2011/PIP%20-%20Social%20networking%20sites%20and%20our%20lives.pdf

Just discovered a dissertation called COMPUTING AND APPLYING TRUST
IN WEB-BASED SOCIAL NETWORKS (via Twitter  - @petrushyna).

Let me just quote the author:

"The computational problem of trust is to determine how much one person in the
network should trust another person to whom they are not connected. I present two sets of algorithms for calculating these trust inferences: one for networks with binary trust ratings, and one for continuous ratings. For each rating scheme, the algorithms are built upon the defined notions of trust.

(...) Given two people, Alice and Bob, I define trust as follows: Alice trusts Bob if
she commits to an action based on a belief that Bob's future actions will lead to a good
outcome. From that definition, functional properties of trust can be extracted, including
transitivity, composability, asymmetry, and personalization."

Here's the link:

http://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/1903/2384/1/umi-umd-2244.pdf

A research paper which argues that mobile phones and portable devices can lead to new perspectives and practices in learning has become the 10,000th item to be deposited in The Open University's research repository - Open Research Online (ORO).