Designing for learning : online social networks as a classroom environment

This paper deploys notions of emergence, connections, and designs for learning to conceptualize high school students’ interactions when using online social media as a learning environment. It makes links to chaos and complexity theories and to fractal patterns as it reports on a part of the first author’s action research study, conducted while she was a teacher working in an Australian public high school and completing her PhD. The study investigates the use of a Ning online social network as a learning environment shared by seven classes, and it examines students’ reactions and online activity while using a range of social media and Web 2.0 tools.

The authors use Graham Nuthall’s (2007) “lens on learning” to explore the social processes and culture of this shared online classroom. The paper uses his extensive body of research and analyses of classroom learning processes to conceptualize and analyze data throughout the action research cycle. It discusses the pedagogical implications that arise from the use of social media and, in so doing, challenges traditional models of teaching and learning.

T-OSN : a trust evaluation model in online social networks

Now days, the online social networks (OSN) have gained considerable popularity. More and more people use OSN to share their interests and make friends, also the OSN helps users overcome the geographical barriers. With the development of OSN, there is an important problem users have to face that is trust evaluation. Before user makes friends with a stranger, the user need to consider the following issues: Can a stranger be trusted? How much the stranger can be trusted? How to measure the trust of a stranger? In this paper, we take two factors, Degree and Contact Interval into consideration, which produce a new trust evaluation model (T-OSN). T-OSN is aimed to solve how to evaluate the trust value of an OSN user, also which is more efficient, more reliable and easy to implement. Base on our research, this model can be used in wide range, such as online social network (OSN) trust evaluation, mobile network message forwarding, ad hoc wireless networking, routing message on Internet and peer-to-peer file sharing network. The T-OSN model has following obvious advantages compare to other trust evaluate methods. First of all, it is not base on features of traditional social network, such as, distance and shortest path. We choose the special features of OSN to build up the model, that is including numbers of friends(Degree) and contact frequency(Contact Interval). These species features makes our model more suitable to evaluate OSN users trust value. Second, the formulations of our model are quite simple but effective. That means, to calculate the result by using our formulations will not cost too much resources. Last but not least, our model is easy to implement for an OSN website, because of the features that we used in our model, such as numbers of friends and contact frequency are easy to obtain. To sum up, our model is using a few resources to obtain a valuable trust value that can help OSN users to solve an important security problem, we believe that will be big step - or development of OSN.

Integrating online social networks with e-commerce : a CBR approach

Integrating online social networks (OSN) with e-commerce is a part of Enterprise 2.0 and social media and is of significance for development of e-commerce and online social networking services. However, how to integrate online social networks including Facebook with e-commerce is still a big issue for companies. Case based reasoning (CBR) has a number of successful applications in e-commerce and web services. This article examines how to integrate OSN with e-commerce, how to integrate CBR with e-commerce and how to integrate CBR with OSN. This article also proposes a CBR architecture for integrating online social networks with e-commerce using CBR as an intelligent intermediary. One of the research findings indicates that the principle of CBR is a useful marketing strategy for integrating e-commerce and OSN. The approach proposed in this research will facilitate the development of e-commerce, Enterprise 3.0 and online social networking services.

Effects of social characters in viral propagation seeding strategies in online social networks

Online social networks have not only become a point of aggregation and exchange of information, they have so radically rooted into our everyday behaviors that they have become the target of important network attacks. We have seen an increasing trend in Sybil based activity, such as in personification, fake profiling and attempts to maliciously subvert the community stability in order to illegally create benefits for some individuals, such as online voting, and also from more classic informatics assaults using specifically mutated worms. Not only these attacks, in the latest months, we have seen an increase in spam activities on social networks such as Facebook and RenRen, and most importantly, the first attempts at propagating worms within these communities. What differentiates these attacks from normal network attacks, is that compared to anonymous and stealthy activities, or by commonly untrusted emails, social networks regain the ability to propagate within consentient users, who willingly accept to partake. In this paper, we will demonstrate the effects of influential nodes against non-influential nodes through in simulated scenarios and provide an overview and analysis of the outcomes.

Models, services and security in modern online social networks

Modern online social networks have revolutionized the world the same way the radio and the plane did, crossing geographical and time boundaries, not without problems, more can be learned, they can still change our world and that their true worth is still a question for the future.

To shut them up or to clarify: restraining the spread of rumors in online social networks

Restraining the spread of rumors in online social networks (OSNs) has long been an important but difficult problem to be addressed. Currently, there are mainly two types of methods 1) blocking rumors at the most influential users or community bridges, or 2) spreading truths to clarify the rumors. Each method claims the better performance among all the others according to their own considerations and environments. However, there must be one standing out of the rest. In this paper, we focus on this part of work. The difficulty is that there does not exist a universal standard to evaluate them. In order to address this problem, we carry out a series of empirical and theoretical analysis on the basis of the introduced mathematical model. Based on this mathematical platform, each method will be evaluated by using real OSN data.We have done three types of analysis in this work. First, we compare all the measures of locating important users. The results suggest that the degree and betweenness measures outperform all the others in the Facebook network. Second, we analyze the method of the truth clarification method, and find that this method has a long-term performance while the degree measure performs well only in the early stage. Third, in order to leverage these two methods, we further explore the strategy of different methods working together and their equivalence. Given a fixed budget in the real world, our analysis provides a potential solution to find out a better strategy by integrating both types of methods together. From both the academic and technical perspective, the work in this paper is an important step towards the most practical and optimal strategies of restraining rumors in OSNs.

Are the popular users always important for information dissemination in online social networks?

This article verifies the importance of popular users in OSNs. The results are counter-intuitive. First, for dissemination speed, a large amount of users can swiftly distribute information to the masses, but they are not highly-connected users. Second, for dissemination scale, many powerful forwarders in OSNs cannot be identified by the degree measure. Furthermore, to control dissemination, popular users cannot capture most bridges of social communities.

A sword with two edges: propagation studies on both positive and negative information in online social networks

Online social networks (OSN) have become one of the major platforms for people to exchange information. Both positive information (e.g., ideas, news and opinions) and negative information (e.g., rumors and gossips) spreading in social media can greatly influence our lives. Previously, researchers have proposed models to understand their propagation dynamics. However, those were merely simulations in nature and only focused on the spread of one type of information. Due to the human-related factors involved, simultaneous spread of negative and positive information cannot be thought of the superposition of two independent propagations. In order to fix these deficiencies, we propose an analytical model which is built stochastically from a node level up. It can present the temporal dynamics of spread such as the time people check newly arrived messages or forward them. Moreover, it is capable of capturing people's behavioral differences in preferring what to believe or disbelieve. We studied the social parameters impact on propagation using this model. We found that some factors such as people's preference and the injection time of the opposing information are critical to the propagation but some others such as the hearsay forwarding intention have little impact on it. The extensive simulations conducted on the real topologies confirm the high accuracy of our model.

Academic social networks affecting the adoption of e-learning in Turkey

This article reports findings from an ethnographic study of e-leaming adopters in Turkey and examines ways in which cultural factors shape the adoption and use of infonnation technology for online teaching. This research focuses on influential early adopters in the tertiary education sector in Turkey who have become change agents by inspiring small networks of their peers into e-learning. The study examines the operation of trust and inspiration in networking and teamwork in the Asian academic environment. A key finding of this research is that the early adopters of e-Ieaming tend to become change agents in small groups and networks. This research sheds light on the mechanisms by which the process of e-Ieaming adoption relies on social networks and connections.

Case study of e-learning experts in Malaysia : impact of social capital and social networks

This paper examines the experiences of selected academics pioneering e-learning in Malaysian tertiary institutions. It begins with an overview of the broad factors shaping the Malaysian educational environment and then proceeds to examine the experience of individual teachers and e-learning programs. It takes an in-depth qualitative approach to engaging with this case study material drawing heavily on semi-structured interviews with key actors.
Conversations with several respondents suggested that the social networks of mentor relations found in the Malaysian case studies might be aptly described as ‘bamboo networks’. Bamboo, which happens to be plentiful in the Malaysian peninsula where these case studies are based, spreads from clump to clump through a series of underground connections involving a mature clump of bamboo sending out a subterranean runner, often over very long distances that then emerge into the open as a new bamboo clump.
All of those interviewed reported that they have found it difficult to find a support base in their first years of pioneering online developments. Consequently, they tended to fall back on their peer networks linked to the institutions at which they had studied. Prominent individuals championing e-learning in the institutions where they teach tend to form small groups for information sharing and networking. They do look to their management for tacit ‘permission’ rather than direct encouragement. Consequently, the active promotion of e-learning in Malaysia can be described as being ‘middle-down’ rather than ‘top-down’ in nature. That is to say, it is mid-level teachers that inspire those below them to join in the development of e-learning programs. They are internally driven and strongly motivated. In time, their activity should produce new generations of locally developed e-learning experts but this has yet to take place in a substantial fashion. This study shows that both men and women ‘academic guanxi’, or peer networks, play a key role in the adoption of online technologies. Key early adopters become change-agents by inspiring a small network of their peers and via their guanxi networks. It was also discovered that motivation is not simply an individual matter but is also about groups and peer networks or communities of exchange and encouragement. In the development of e-learning in Malaysia, there is very little activity that is not linked to small clusters of developers who are tied into wider networks through personal contacts.
Like clumping bamboo, whilst the local clusters tend to be easily seen, the longer-range ‘subterranean’ personal connections are generally not nearly so immediately obvious. These connections are often the product of previous mentoring relationships, including the relationships between influential teachers and their former postgraduate students. These relationships tend to work like bamboo runners: they run off in multiple directions, subterranean and unseen and then throw up new clumps that then send out fresh runners of their own.

Virtual design studio via social networks

With the advent of social networks, it became apparent that the social aspect of designing and learning plays a crucial role in students’ education. The ease of communication, leadership opportunity, democratic interaction, teamwork, and the sense of community are some of the aspects that are now in the centre of design interaction. Online interactions, multimedia, mobile computing and face-to-face learning create blended learning environments to which some Virtual Design Studios (VDS) have reacted. On the sample of a design studio at Deakin University the paper discusses details of the Social Network VDS, its pedagogical implications to PBL, and presents how it is successful in empowering architectural students to collaborate and communicate design proposals that integrate a variety of skills, deep learning, and construction of knowledge. It studies the effectiveness of the generated social intelligence and explores the facilitation of students’ self-directed learning. Hereby the paper studies the construction of knowledge via social interaction and how blended learning environments foster motivation and information exchange.

Modeling malware propagation in smartphone social networks

Smartphones have become an integral part of our everyday lives, such as online information accessing, SMS/MMS, social networking, online banking, and other applications. The pervasive usage of smartphones also results them in enticing targets of hackers and malware writers. This is a desperate threat to legitimate users and poses considerable challenges to network security community. In this paper, we model smartphone malware propagation through combining mathematical epidemics and social relationship graph of smartphones. Moreover, we design a strategy to simulate the dynamic of SMS/MMS-based worm propagation process from one node to an entire network. The strategy integrates infection factor that evaluates the propagation degree of infected nodes, and resistance factor that offers resistance evaluation towards susceptible nodes. Extensive simulations have demonstrated that the proposed malware propagation model is effective and efficient.

Network dynamics of mobile social networks

With the rapid development of smartphones and mobile Internet technology, we witness an overwhelming growth of mobile social networks (MSN), which is a type of social network, forming virtual communities among people with similar interests or commonalities. In MSNs, users play a crucial role for their development, deployment and success. Understanding the MSN user behavior therefore attracts interests of different entities - ISPs, service providers, and researchers. However, it is hard to gather a comprehensive real data set, little is known and even less has been published about MSN user activities. In this paper, we focus on analyzing MSN user behavior from the perspective of ISP network, which is seldom reported in literature. Based on the real data set collected from the mobile network gateway of a major mobile carrier who has more than five million subscribers, we present an in-depth user behavior analysis of four popular social networks. We study the MSN user behavior from six aspects: user requests, active online time, sessions, inter-session, the number of requests in a session, and inter-request. We found that power law and lognormal are two popular features of the studied objects, and exposed some interesting findings as well. We hope our work could be helpful for ISPs, MSN content providers, and researchers. © 2014 IEEE.