Social media to learn a new language

In addition to Duolingo, there are other social media to learn a new language. For example,

BusuuItalki
Lang-8
Live Mocha
My Happy Planet
Palabea
VoxSwap

All of them provide learners opportunity to find native speakers of the new language to help correct writing, chat, watch instructional videos, or answer questions. Among those social media, I especially like Live Mocha and Palabea.

Live Mocha provides learner incentives, Mocha and teacher points, for learning. For actively engaging in the site or completing course works, learners could earn Mocha points, and for helping other users with correcting, flashcards or translations, they could earn teacher points. With those points, users could enjoy more functions provided by the website.

In Palabea, learners could record their own video lesson and then upload to the site, which is also used in my class before knowing this website.

I think those two ides in Live Mocha and Palabea are also great for classroom learning. I have tried the later one for two semesters and receive great feedback from my students.

What do people think about using social media in education?

I cam across read an article, My Favorite Teachers Use Social Media: A Student Perspective, which believe that students will appreciate instructors' using social media in classroom and thus encourages instructors to do that. The article is quite common. But the following three comments are interesting.

All of the three comments indicate that people have negative opinions about the usage of social media in education. They think that (1) social media let people ignore real-life communication; (2) students dislike instructors using social media in education because of fears about instructors "stalking" them and performing not well; and (3) technology, including social media, fail to actually attract students' attention.

We are students majoring at instructional technology and thus are enthusiastic about social media in education. However, in most of other majors, social media seem to be seldom used by instructors. Moreover, many people hold similar opinions with the aforementioned three comments. These really give us challenges to design effective usage of social media in education and promote it.

Cultural differences on social media

Do you think there are culture differences on social media among different countries?

Yes. For example, Asian people are fans of male stars look like this:

and this:

I think most of American won't be obsessed by them.

Some people think that there are cultural differences in how people want to meet
why Facebook will not rule the world is among different countries. For instance, "In Australia and the US, most of us grew up with a sense of comfort in who we are, but we're lucky that way," says Steven Goh, co-founder of social network Migme. "In Indonesia, the Middle East, parts of Asia, it's not the same and they want to be able to play online without it having real world ramifications. So we let them create a virtual identity, which is very important for our users."

And thus we see the two new social media based on the belief: Migme and GetYou. Different from Facebook, Migme allows people to use names (rather than real names) or avatars they like and GetYou users are encouraged to meet new people rather than people they already know.

In China, most of people like to use screen names rather than real name, but at the same time they like to have official authentication by Sina Weibo. Most of social media in both China and America do allow users have options to choose to use real or screen names.

Also, in my opinion, GetYou will not be popular in China because most of people are on the alert of fraud.

Employers are "stalking" you without being noticed

I came across the article and found that employers could use many ways to "stalk" you without being notice by you.

For example, create a private list so that employers won't be listed as a follower, use
Facebook Graph Search to find hidden photos and posts, change the setting of LinkedIn or search LinkedIn profiles under the radar to be anonymously for "Who's Viewed Your Profile". 

In the article, the author illustrated "six red flags that may indicate trouble ahead":

• Negative posts about a past employer.
• The regular use of graphic or unprofessional language.
• Excessive typos or poor grammar.
• Frequent party/drinking photos.
• Constant negativity or blaming.
• Any posts or images that contradict facts or history from resume or interview

Meanwhile the author also mentioned that "it's important to look for behavioral patterns rather than one-off posts or images".

After knowing these, will you still keep active in posting? Will you still post your real thinking? When posting something, will you think about or avoid sensitive topics or words? Will you only show your positive side on social media?

As a lurking on social media, I seldom post anything on social media. Will employers think me as an introverted, withdrawn, and unsociable person so that I might lose some job opportunities?

Or we just keep what we are on social media and do not care about employers "stalking" us?

What do you think?

Continue a Conversation on Social Media

I read an interesting article that provides 10 ways to continue a conversation with someone on social media. And I am thinking whether those ways could be also useful in conversation in classroom.

#1: Wish Your Followers A Wonderful Week/Weekend

Yes, wishing students a good day after class will help enhance relationships with students.

#2: Ask A Question

Yes, always asking questions to students to get feedback and stimulate their thoughts.

#3: Have Multiple Conversations With The Same Person

Yes, it would be good to have conversation with students in the class and after class.

#4: Thank Your Followers For Sharing Your Content

Yes, encouraging students to share their thoughts, achievements, and methods could fulfills their sense of accomplishment as well as facilitates communication among the class.

#5: Include Pictures In Your Posts

This could be understood as using multiple medium in instruction.

#6: Only Talk To The Right People

No, instructors should talk to all of students, not just students that show interest in lecture.

#7: Respond Quicker

Yes, this gives good impressions to students.

#8: Quiz Your Followers

Ooh, instructors always quiz their students.

#9: Poll

That would be good to get to know students.

#10: Thoughtfully Contribute To The Conversation

Of course, instructors should guide conversation and provide thoughtful contribution to the conversation.

Should Instructors Use Social Media to “Monitor” Students?

You all might hear this news: 

"18-year-old Robert Brever of Broken Arrow Oklahoma allegedly stabbed his parents and three siblings in a late-night attack. Authorities have charged him with five counts of first-degree murder and a count of aggravated assault."

Oklahoma police are searching Brever’s social media accounts, including Facebook and Pinterest, trying to find clues about his motives. This way to find more insight about criminal suspects is not new. Also, social media can provide police with warnings, because people nowadays are open to share their experience, interest, and thoughts in social media.

Drawn inspiration from police using social media, it seems like that instructors should use social media to get to know their students, their students' performance, opinions about the instructors and courses. For example, knowing students' interests could help instructors design and develop instruction material and strategies and thus motivate students.

On the contrary, there are still many challenges in implementing this in the real world. Doing this means that instructors should spend much more time after the class. Also, will students post their real thoughts when they know that their instructors are "monitoring" them. More importantly, students might not like to be known through their social media. Even if students friend with their instructors, they still could block instructors seeing some posts by changing setting in social media.

Fansub

Fansub are subtitles for foreign movies and TV shows translated by fans rather than officially translation organizations.

Americans might be unfamiliar about it, but almost every Chinese people have watched foreign movies and TV shows with fansub. I will not talk about intellectual property here, although it is a controversial issue.

Fansub could be regarded as user-generated content and thus has many strengths.

1. It is easy to understand, because fans use easy and humorous words, phrases, and ways to translate foreign languages. Also, they often add comments, their understandings, and related knowledge into fansub.

2. It creates many buzzwords and interesting names for characters in movies and shows and actors.

3. It is a collaboration work with common property and individual credits shown at the beginning oe end of the movie or show.

4. Fans are naturally engaged in translating, because they are fans of the movie or show. Most of fansub translators are students studying overseas and it is very common for them to stay up late to translate without any compensation.

Whenever students could become fans of disciplines, maybe we do not need to think ways to activate them in learning.

Using Apps in Instruction

Recently, I found two interesting graph that guides instructors using Apps in instruction.

The first one is the Periodic Table of iPad Apps (please click here for a high revolution version). It divides 82 Apps into eight categories associated instruction: creativity, demonstrating, learning, teaching, computing, collaboration, numeracy, and literacy. Checking familiar social media Apps in this table, we could find that:

Twitter is good for teaching;
Edmodo and Pinterst are good for collaboration;
Interestingly, Facebook is not in the category of collaboration of the table.

The second one is the Padagogy Wheel 4.0  (please click here for a high revolution version), which based on Bloom's Taxonomy, i.e., understanding, remembering, applying, analyzing, evaluation, and creating. Also, some familiar social media Apps are also in the wheel:

Twitter is good for remembering and understanding;
Facebook, YouTube, Edmodo, and Blackboard are good for evaluation.

Through combining the two graphs, I am curious why Twitter is considered for one-way learning, e.g., teaching, remembering, and understanding, rather than two-way communication. And due to the limit of 140 characters (I guess), Twitter is not considered to be highly used for evaluation as Facebook and YouTube.

Ice Cream Social Media

Recently, company NetBase analyzed social media activity (conversations across social networks, review sites, blogs and forums) between April 18 and July 10 and found the top five flavors of ice cream gained the most attention. Those five top flavors of ice cream are chocolate, strawberry, cookie dough, vanilla, and coffee flavors.

Then I used Google Trends to compare people's interest in those five flavors of ice cream and got the graph below.

In the second graph, the interest in those five flavors from highest to lowest are vanilla, chocolate, coffee, strawberry, and chocolate dough. In other words, the two graphs have not small difference. How to interpret those differences (except the accuracy of the first study and the short time for the first study)? 

First, the key words in those two graphs are different. The first study looks at the attention, which could be in good or bad way, while the second one looks at the interest, which is more on the good way. That is because searching terms most of time means that you are interested (in a good way) in the terms. If you hate the chocolate flavor of ice cream, why bother spending time in searching it?

Second, audience engaged in social activities (including social networks, review sites, blogs, and online forums) might be different from people using google. I mean, there are many lurkers who use google search very often but rarely write posts in social media.

What are implications of the comparison? 

It is wrong to simply treat social media as a miniature of internet or real world. Also, it is important to analyze users of social media, which is the basic thing to analyze anything associated with social media. 

Why Use Content Curation in Education?

What is content curation?

Several years ago, we emphasize on user-generated content, but now facing rich content, we turn to organizing existing content. Content curation is a act to discover, assess, compile, and share existing content online.

Then, why do we need to use content curation in education? Here are my answers:

1. Information and knowledge is constantly changing, and thus it requires instructors to update info and knowledge and curated textbooks.

2. Content curation provide instructors a good way to flip the classroom. Instructors could select a topic and ask students to make content curation about the topic. In this way, students not only are empowered and then deepen their own understandings, but also facilitate communication with peers and the instructor.

3. Content curation is a new way for instructors to assess students' understandings and performance. Do content curation well requires students spending time to search relevant content as well as assess the content and organize in a meaningful way. And thus through looking at students' content curation, instructors would have a comprehensive way to assess students' performance.

4. It fits in with the new needs of the society, which requires students have more practical skills.

Buy Buttons

Recently, some companies plan to add buy buttons in their systems, which allows fewer clicks or payment within the system rather than through the merchant websites.

Facebook had started testing a buy button for Shopify in this June.

Google was planning to add a buy button on the search results pages in May.

YouTube was also planning to add buy buttons to TrueView ads in May.

Pinterest created“Buyable Pins” to let users but items on their websites in June.

What do you feel about those "buy buttons"? Do you dislike integrating business into social media?

Personally saying, I do not like this way.

In China, Sina Weibo, QQ, and Wechat are full of business. It is not uncommon to see some ads, using appearance of sharing good products or services, in some celebrities' Weibo. And those products are always from small and unknown factories. Therefore, the celebrities are often criticized about it. Moreover, if one of your friends use Weibo, QQ, and Wechat as platforms to advertise and sell products, it would be a disaster for you. That is because his/her ads occupy most of room in your updated feed every minute.

Danmu!

What is Danmu (弹幕)?

In English, it refers to "Bullet Hell" or "Bullet Curtain", which is a function that allows floating comments created by any watchers overlay onto the video. It is firstly invented by a video sharing website in Japan, Niconico, and has its name-Danmaku- in Japanese.

Due to the sense of a shared watching experience, Danmu right now is popular in both Japan and China. China has two websites that are specialized in Danmu, namely, Acfun and Bilibili. Moreover, recently, three Chinese movies, 秦时明月之龙腾万里, 小时代：刺金时代, and 绣春刀, had some special screenings that allowed audience use their cell phones or tablets to use Danmu. The following two pics show one screening. And the movie tickets for these screenings were in great demand.



Interesting, Danmu now is not limited in videos or movies.  A Chinese computer engineer and lay stock investor recently launched a website for people to post Danmy on the state of the Chinese stock market, which attracts Chinese people's significant attention. (Please click here for more details)

However, Danmu does have many shortcomings such as destroying the whole movie if having too many comments, and possibilities of having dirty, personal attack and other bad comments. And thus, many researchers are not optimistic about the future of Danmu.

What do you think about Danmu?

The Magic of Sharing

Thank to the internet, people nowadays could broaden much bigger networks than before. Using the idea of sharing, people create lots of enterprises. Every idea about sharing is a good business opportunity.

Sharing videos→YouTube
Sharing ratings→Yelp, Rate My Professors, Rate My Physicians, IMDb, Douban
Sharing annotations→diigo
Sharing pics→Pinterest, Flickr
Sharing documents→Google Doc, Dropbox
Sharing things (borrow things)→yerdle

Sharing textbook→Chegg

Sharing dresses and accessories→RenttheRunway

Sharing skills→Skillshare

Sharing cars→Getaround
Sharing driveway, garage or parking spot→ParkAtMyHouse
Sharing ride→Lyft

Sharing manpower for tasks→TaskRabbit

Sharing themselves as tour guides→Vayable

Sharing themselves as pet sitter→DogVacay

From the above, we could find some trends:

1. From unsubstantial to substantial things

Videos, ratings, and pics are treated as unsubstantial things and are easy to share, and so they are used for sharing first. After many of unsubstantial things being used for star-ups, people turn to think about sharing substantial things, e.g., textbooks, dress, and cars.

2. From things to manpower

Recently, people would like to put their specialities, enrich their life, and make money, and thus enterprises that help people find people and recommend themselves for some tasks appear.

3. Focus on one specific side

The above enterprises just focus on one rather than more than one sides, things or tasks. It is rare to see one enterprise to offer platform for people to share everything or many things.

Therefore, think today about what other things or specific tasks could be shared and would be popular. You will be the next star for startups.

The Triple Revolutions Causes Social Isolation or Closes Social Networks?

The triple revolution refers to networked revolution, internet revolution, and mobile revolution. Whether it cause social isolation or it close social networks will be answered by using my own experience. That is, with different experience, people might have different understanding and answers.

Before the middle school (when I was 11 years old), the internet and mobile did not popularize. During those days, I felt engaged all the day whenever in school or at home.

In school, as a member of a fixed class, I studied with my classmates all together for same courses. During the break, 10 minutes between classes, we played rubber band, shuttlecock, and other group games. After school, I went home with other classmates who live near me. And on the way home, we talked, bought snacks, and played group games.

When I came back home, I had many neighborhood friends that play with me. We could talk things happened at school, play group games, and watch TV.

Nowadays I never see elementary or middle-school students play the same group games as we did. What I see is that each of them surf on the internet at his/her bedroom. Little face-to-face communications. Although parents plan to find play dates for their children, when children come together, they play mobile phones, computers, and ipads on their own. Most of them keep taciturnity and do not want to talk much with peers.

However, if checking up some online forums, social media, you will find teenagers are active, interactive, and talkative, which are totally different from their performance in the real world. Therefore, I am not sure which side, offline or online, are their true one. At least, the triple revolution does not cause complete social isolation.

One thing I am impressed and quite sure is that internet did close our social networks. When I was young, my father work abroad. Now and again, my mother took me to photographic studio to take photos and then send to my father with letters. It took about 20 days to get to my father and then he replied us. Now I am abroad, but I face time with my family two times each day. I could see their face and listen to their voices, which sometimes causes me feel like at home with them. Thanks to internet for maintaining ties with my family and friends even we are apart by half-way round the world.

SLNs Wesites

There are many Social Learning Networks Websites. I registered and tried 8 of them. And now I will introduce briefly about them.

Schoology
The structure is similar to Blackboard, and has functions of badges and analytics.
Edmodo
The functions are similar to Schoology, but it seems to be not all-sided as in Schoology.
Computing ++
It is specially for computing education. People could use the map in the system to find what you need or offer help for computing education in the world.
EFL Classroom 2.0
It is a community for English language learners and teachers. It is not free to join.
Ganers  Advancing Meaningful Education
It is an online community of global educators who game and provides webinars and F2F presentations.
Integrating Technology for Active Life-long Learning
It is a network that provides educators with skills and knowledge to develop courses for Moodle, MOOCs, and so on.
Life Pulp 
It is a network to share your inspiration.
My Big Campus
It is similar to Schoology and Edmodo.

What is Social Learning Networks?

In this week's learning, I have access to a new concept, Social Learning Networks, and thus know many tools about it.

So, what is Social learning Networks? It seems to be easy to understand the concept by understanding words by words. Also, it has the following characteristics based on my understanding:

1. Collaboration Learning
2. Instructors as facilitators
3. Peer Learning
4. Communication
5. Sharing

Blackboard (Bb) is one of tool for Social Learning Networks, and I will use it as an example to explain those characteristics.

1. Students in Bb could use group discussion to collaborate on a task by communicating, sharing, and learning from each other.
2. Instructors, especially of online courses, upload reading materials, learning videos, assignments, and so on to create an learning context, to provide necessary materials, and establish norms. Also, instructors offer platforms (e.g., discussion board) for students to share, communicate, negotiate, and learn with each other. Therefore, instructors are more like facilitators than knowledge importer.
3. Through communicating and collaborating with peers, students understand, learn and apply.
4. Students could communicate with each other in both formal (e.g., discussion board and sending emails) and informal (e.g., using mobile or other social media) settings.
5. Students share not only other learning resources, but also their own understanding by asking and answering questions.

Produsage for Courses

In this course, it is my first time to touch the concept "produsage". After knowing the meanings of produage, I found it to be similar to one of my previous idea about instruction.

I used video production in my Chinese teaching. That is, students are given a big topic, for example, characters in period of Three Kingdoms, and then are asked to choose one of characters, search his/her life story, write a introduction about the character, and make a video to instruct other students about the character and Chinese words, phrases, grammars regarding to the video.

However, produsage is different from my ides about video production in its four characteristics: 1) Open participation and communal evaluation; 2) Fluid heterarchy through ad hoc meritocracies; 3) Palimpsestic unfinished artifacts in a continuing process; and 4) Common property and individual rewards.

Now, I am thinking that for each course in higher education we could provide a platform for students, including those who already took the course, are taking, or will take, to create, contribute, modify course contents. Students write questions and answer others' questions in the platform. Also, they could "like" helpful answers and based on the number of "like", students could choose their correct answers. After several semesters, this platform would be a good place for learning knowledge of the course. 

Community vs. Network and Online Community vs. Social Network

After reading two articles about community vs. Network and online community vs. social network, I am a little confused.

Using my own understanding on the first article, I summarize differences between community and network, which is shown as below.

Community	Network
Small	Large
intimate	Anonymous
By nature or artificial	Artificial
Require whole parts of a person	Require a part(s) of a person

And for the second article, the author states that social media has two forms: online community and social network. And I also summarize differences between them based on my understanding, which is shown as below.

Online Community	Social Network
Each person could have many	Each person has one
Focus on shared things, e.g., interest and profession	Focus on connecting to other people
Have different trajectories	Centered by the person itself

When reading the two articles separately, I agree with both of them. However, after reading the two, I am a little confused.

The first one thinks that one common thing shared could form a network rather than a community, because a community requires higher standards, that is, "nurturing the whole person". And thus, a company that a person works for is a network rather than a community, because it is rare for the person to talk everything, e.g., politics, religions, and private life, in the company.

The second one states that shared things could form an online community rather than a social network. First, each person only has one social network. Second, online community just requires one common thing rather than "nurturing the whole person". Therefore, an online forum for higher-education instructors in Chinese as a foreign language is an online community.

Any points in the two articles and mu understandings are wrong? If not, how to explain the contradiction between them? The main point is whether merely having one common things could form an online community or it requires other higher requirements.

The Fuctionalities of Sina Weibo

Kietzmann, Hermkens, McCarthy, and Silvestre (2011) present fuctionalities of serveral sites, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube, and Facebook.

Here based on mu understanding about the seven functions and Weibo, I present the functionalities of Weibo, with the darker color indicating the more Weibo emphasize.

Presence:
Using Weibo, people cannot know if other users are accessible.

Groups:

Weibo actually do not have any formal communities or subcommunities, if all of followers of a certain people are not accounted to be communities.

Relationships:

Weibo does not show someone you might know or be interested. But you could check followers of your followers and people you follow. And so it doe not so emphasize relationships as much as Facebook and LinkedIn.

Identity:

In Weibo, you could choose to show real names, genders, ages, and professions, and also request Weibo for identification, which is indicated by "v" besides your account names. However, it is not mandatory and most of Weibo users are not identified.

Reputation:

Reputation in Weibo are often identified by the number of followers. For example, celebrity often have millions of followers and thus you could identified the hottest super stars by checking the number of their followers. Also, the number of comments and likes are other indicators.

Conversation:

Of course, as a social media, Weibo foster conversation among users.

Sharing:

Different from LinkedIn and Facebook, users in Weibo often share photos, musics, videos, and products and services that they think to be good or bad. Interestingly, there are many Weibo accounts just use "sharing" to make money. For example, there are at least one Weibo in a city to be as a platform for all of Weiboers to post photos of restaurants and food as well as their comments, which is like Yelp.


Reference:
Kietzmann, J. H., Hermkens, K., McCarthy, I. P., & Silvestre, B. S. (2011). Social media? Get serious! Understanding the functional building blocks of social media. Business horizons, 54(3), 241-251.

Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Social Media

This picture shows the people's interest on Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and social media from 2004 to 2016 (predicted). We could find that Web 2.0 and social media interest people much more than Web 1.0 does. Also, since 2006 and 2009, Web 2.0 and social media respectively have increased greatly. Moreover, from 2009, Web 2.0 seems to decrease and till 2016 it is predicted to interest people at a same low level as Web 1.0.

Next, let us see history of some famous companies (from Wikipedia).

Facebook:
Launched on February 4, 2004;
Be opened to everyone at least 13 years old on September 26, 2006;
Increased steadily after 2009;
Have 500 million users in July 2010, which makes it to be the largest online social network in the world at the time.

Twitter:
Launched in July 2006;
Have more than 100 million users in 2012.

LinkedIn:
Launched on May 5, 2003;
Have 20 million members in 2006;
Have more than 364 million acquired users in 2015.

Yelp:
Launched ( as service to provide unsolicited online reviews) in late 2005.

YouTube:
Created in February 2005;
Have a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos in May 2010.

Therefore, I have the following findings:

1. Around 2006, people show the highest interest in Web 2.0, which emphasize on user-generated content and interaction between users.
2. With the high interest in Web 2.0, companies that apply the two main features of Web 2.0 are created by people successively, for example, Facebook, YouTube, and Yelp.
3. Although people's interest in Web 2.0 began to decrease since 2008, another term, social media, has given rise to people's interest. And thus services that aim to maintain and expand people's social networking have increased rapidly since then. Till now, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, for example, are still hot topics.

How to Use Weibo?

Although Weibo has an English edition, many parts in Weibo are still using Chinese. And thus Americans would be confused in figuring out how to use it. In this post, I will explain how to use Weibo, using iphone 6 as an example.

After you download and install Weibo, you will see the interface:

You need to choose "sign up" or "log in". After logging in the Weibo, you will see the welcome picture, and just click "enter Weibo".

Then you will see the homepage, which shows posts of Weiboer that you follow as well as a small part of advertised Weiboer (that pay to be shown in your homepage to try to have you as their followers). At the top, for example, "papain" is my account name, and people could use this name to find me.

At the bottom, you could click "discover" to find hot topics and your new followers. Your posts will be shown in your followers' homepage. Importantly, people that are not your followers will also be able to see your posts and you will never know who have seen your posts.
Also, if people want to be your followers, they do not need you to permit. It is same as someone could like you without your permission.
If you want to find hot topics or someone you are interested in, just search the topic name or the people's names at the top of the page.

Also, you could click "message" to see messages that someone @ you (that is, someone talk to you in public), someone comment on your posts, and someone send you ( which is only be seen by you and senders).