Special Issue “Socially Mediated Publicness”, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (JOBEM),

From the introduction:

Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media (Taylor and Francis)

“Social media complicate the very nature of public life. In this article, we consider how technology reconfigures publicness, blurs ‘audiences’ and publics, and alters what it means to engage in public life. The nature of publicness online is shaped by the architecture and affordances of social media, but also by people’s social contexts, identities, and practices. Navigating socially mediated publicness requires new mechanisms of control and new skills. Understanding socially-mediated publicness is an ever-shifting process throughout which people juggle blurred boundaries, multi-layered audiences, individual attributes, the specifics of the systems they use, and the contexts of their use.”

The articles are open access. The introduction offers an overview of the individual articles ans well as a sound conceptualization of “socially mediated publicness”

I found Eden Litt’s article on “the imagined audience” particularly interesting. When I wrote my PhD thesis on the design of educational resources, I interviewed developers of educational Web portals and was intrigued by the different ways they conceptualized their target groups and how information on the actual audience informed the “imagined audience”.
 Litt, E. (2012): Knock, Knock. Who’s There? The Imagined Audience, Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56:3, 330-345
  • “The imagined audience is the mental conceptualization of the people with whom we are communicating, our audience.” (331)
  • “mere imagined audience can be just as influential as the actual audience in determining behavior” (331)
  • “During face-to-face settings, and even some one-to-one mediated communication, people typically interact with small and explicit audiences relying more on who they can
  • see or hear in the actual audience, rather than their imagination. However, characteristics of social media platforms have altered the size, composition, boundaries,
  • accessibility, and cue availability of our communication partners during everyday interactions making it nearly impossible to determine the actual audience.” (332)
  • “Without being able to know the actual audience, social media users create and attend to an imagined audience for their everyday interactions.” (333)
  • In the conclusion, Litt draws attention to techniques for conceptualizing the audience that could be leveraged for social media profiles:
  • “Some industries have spent lots of time and money attempting to understand who is on the other side of the screen. While not all of these strategies may be economically feasible nor time efficient for everyday social media users, such as focus groups, there are many other industry-learned strategies that people may be underutilizing. For example, Berkenkotter (1981) identified that successful publishing scholars were much more likely to ‘‘internalize’’ the audience than a layman or student writer (p. 395). These scholars were constantly asking themselves what the reader might think or ask. Likewise, some in the Web design industry create ‘‘personas’’ or fictionalized individuals based on empirical research to help them think realistically about their users beyond ‘‘users’’ (Massanari, 2010). One potential strategy then is to focus on making users more cognizant of their imagined audience and teaching them techniques to help them gain more insight on the make-up of their potential audience. This might include, for example, teaching users to take advantage of a site’s analytics functionality or educating users on understanding and reviewing their privacy settings before posting.” (342)
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Special Issue on OER and Social Inclusion, Distance Education 33(2)

Distance Education is a peer-reviewed journal of the Open and Distance Learning Association of Australia, Inc. It publishes research and scholarly material in the fields of open, distance and flexible education. The current special issue comprises 12 articles by leading OER and e-learning specialists. True to the topic, the issue is open access.

  1. Gráinne Conole

  2. Andy Lane

  3. Carina Bossu, David Bull, Mark Brown

  4. Samuel Nikoi, Alejandro Armellini

  5. Julie Willems, Carina Bossu

  6. Thomas Richter, Maggie McPherson

  7. Eileen Scanlon

  8. Christine Hockings, Paul Brett, Mat Terentjevs

  9. Cheryl Hodgkinson-Williams, Michael Paskevicius

  10. Terry Harding

  11. Liam Phelan

  12. Don Olcott

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The Rise of E-Reading

In April 2012, Pew Internet Research  published the results of a study on reading habits. The Reading Habits Survey (PDF, 68 pages) obtained telephone interviews with a nationally representative sample of 2,986 people ages 16 and older living in the United States.

The report entitled “The Rise of E-Reading” shows that e-books are of growing importance in the US.

A fifth of American adults have read an e-book in the past year and the number of e-book readers grew after a major increase in ownership of e-book reading devices and tablet computers during the holiday gift-giving season.  A pre-holiday survey found that 17% of Americans age 18 and older had read an e-book in the previous 12 months and a post-holiday survey found that the number had grown to 21%. This coincides with significant increases in ownership of e-book reading devices and tablet computers over the holiday gift-giving season. Ownership of e-book readers like the original Kindle and Nook jumped from 10% in December to 19% in January and ownership of tablet computers such as iPads and Kindle Fires increased from 10% in mid-December to 19% in January. In all, 29% of Americans age 18 and older own at least one specialized device for e-book reading – either a tablet or an e-book reader.

The recently published fact sheet summary includes  data on market shares of different e-book readers:

” Among those who have read an e-book in the past 12 months:

  • 42% said they read their e-books on a computer
  • 41% consumed their e-books on an e-book reader like original Kindles or Nooks
  • 29% read their e-books on a cell phone
  • 23% consumed their e-books on a tablet computer.”
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Publication on Design Based Research

Anderson, T. & Shattuck, J. (2012). Design-based research: A decade of progress in education research? Educational Researcher, 41 (1), 16-25.

Available at SAGE online.

The article summarizes the history of design based research, compares the DBR approach to action research and gives an overview of current practices; The authors conclude:

“From this study we learned that DBR is being utilized increas- ingly in educational contexts and especially those in the United States. It seems to be especially attractive for use in K–12 contexts and with technological interventions. The increasing number of studies reported suggests that researchers and graduate students are finding ways to meet the time demands of multiple iteration studies.” (p.24)

What distinguishes DBR from other approaches? Anderson and Shattuck highlight the characteristics of DBR studies as being situated in a real educational context, focusing on the design and testing of a significant intervention, implementing multiple iterations, involving a collaborative partnership between researchers and practitioners and resulting in the evolution of design principles.

“DBR is a methodology designed by and for educators that seeks to increase the impact, transfer, and translation of educa- tion research into improved practice. In addition, it stresses the need for theory building and the development of design princi- ples that guide, inform, and improve both practice and research in educational contexts.” (p. 16)

The authors strongly relate Design Based Research to qualitative methodologies:

“Unlike quantitative studies, most DBR studies do not produce measureable effect sizes that demonstrate ´what works´. However, they provide rich descriptions of the contexts in which the studies occurred, the challenges of implementation, the development processes involved in creating and administrating the interventions, and the design principles that emerged.” (p. 22)

 

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SURF Report: Users, narcissism and control

This report explores the explosion of tracking tools that have accompanied the surge of web based information instruments. Is it possible to monitor ‘real-time’ how new research findings are being read, cited, used and transformed in practical results and applications? And what are the potential risks and disadvantages of the new tracking tools? This report aims to contribute to a better understanding of these developments by providing a detailed assessment of the currently available novel tools and methodologies. A total of 16 quite different tools are assessed.

The report concludes that web based academic publishing is producing a variety of novel information filters. These allow the researcher to make some sort of limited self-assessment with respect to the response to his/her work. However, this does not mean that these technologies and databases can also legitimately be used in research assessments. For this application, they need to adhere to a far stricter protocol of data quality and indicator reliability and validity. Most new tools do not (yet) comply with these more strict quality criteria.

Wouters, P. & Costas, R. (2012).Users, narcissism and control. (PDF)

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Social Networking Sites

A survey by Pew Internet states that 64% of online adults in the US use social networking sites – that amounts to half the full adult population. Among internet users, social networking sites are most popular with young adults under age 30. As of August 2011, there were no significant differences in use of social networking sites based on gender, race and ethnicity, and household income. The results are based on data from telephone interviews conducted in July and August 2011, among a sample of 2,260 adults, age 18 and older.

Pew Internet (2012). The tone of life on social networking sites. (PDF, online).

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Horizon 2012


The annual Horizon Project, a joint initiative by the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative and the New Media Consortium, charts the landscape of emerging technologies for teaching, learning and creative inquiry. Since the launch of the Horizon Project in March 2002, each year a distinguished advisory board reviews a wide range of articles, research papers, postings, and websites to generate a list of technologies, trends, challenges, and issues that knowledgeable people in technology industries, higher education, and museums are thinking about.

On February 13th, the 2012 Horizon Report Advisory Board has released the “NMC Horizon Report: 2012 Higher Education Edition“.

“This year’s NMC Horizon Report identifies mobile apps and tablet computing as technologies expected to enter mainstream use in the first horizon of one year or less. Game-based learning and learning analytics are seen in the second horizon of two to three years; gesture-based computing and the Internet of Things are seen emerging in the third horizon of four to five years.” (NMC press release)

 

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