The potentials and pitfalls of social networking sites such as Facebook in higher education contexts

Popular social networking sites such as Facebook demonstrate an emerging opportunity for students and educators within formal higher education contexts to share ideas, celebrate creativity and participate in an environment which offers immediate feedback from others who belong within a specific network. As this is an emerging use of the technology, an autoethnographic approach has helped capture the potentials and pitfalls of incorporating social networking within higher education. The findings highlight implications for the key stakeholders in higher education.

Attack vectors against social networking systems : the Facebook example

Social networking systems (SNS’s) such as Facebook are an ever evolving and developing means of social interaction, which is not only being used to disseminate information to family, friends and colleagues but as a way of meeting and interacting with "strangers" through the advent of a large number of social applications. The attractiveness of such software has meant a dramatic increase in the number of frequent users of SNS’s and the threats which were once common to the Internet have now been magnified, intensified and altered as the potential for criminal behaviour on SNS’s increases. Social networking sites including Facebook contain a vast amount of personal information, that if obtained could be used for other purposes or to carry out other crimes such as identity theft. This paper will focus on the security threats posed to social networking sites and gain an understanding of these risks by using a security approach known as “attack trees”. This will allow for a greater understanding of the complexity associated with protecting Social Networking systems with a particular focus on Facebook.

Closed vs open corporate social networking communities : a case study of the Victoria Police and Dairy Australia.

The availability of affordable, user-friendly audio-visual equipment, software and the Internet, allows anyone to become a content creator or media outlet. This exploratory case study examines the adoption of social networking by Victoria Police and Diary Australia, a non-media and non-profit organization respectively, in corporate communication, public infmmation and community relations. The paper initiates discussions on the implications for traditional media and audiences of this phenomenon. It content analyzed the two websites during a two-week period and conducted interviews with their moderators about the sites' content, functions and efficacy. The purpose, role and community acceptance of these sites are examined, along with organizational motivations for establishing these channels to reach audiences, bypassing traditional media's gatekeeping function. It highlights how these organizations may set both media and public agendas when traditional media use this web content in their news gathering and reporting, similar to using press releases in the past.

Web 2.0 virtual design studio : social networking as facilitator of design education

In 2009, Deakin University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong trailed the use of Web 2.0 technologies to enhance learning outcomes in a third-year architectural design studio that was modelled on the virtual design studios (VDSs) of the past decades. The studio developed the VDS further by integrating a social learning environment into the blended learning experience. The Web 2.0 VDS utilized the social networking site Ning.com, YouTube, Skype and various three-dimensional modelling, video and image processing, and chat software to deliver lectures, communicate learning goals, disseminate learning resources, submitting, providing feedback and comments to various design works, and assessing of students’ outcomes. This research centres on issues of learning and teaching associated with the development of a social network VDS.

Enterprise social networking in knowledge-intensive work practices : a case study in a professional service firm

Social media technologies are making fast inroads into organisations. In the context of knowledge-intensive work the propositions of improved communication, information sharing and user involvement seem particularly promising. We study the phenomenon of Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) in the context of Professional Service Firms (PSF). Our case study investigates emerging knowledge work practices on the ESN platform Yammer within Deloitte Australia. We perform a genre analysis of communication data and uncover a set of emerging practices. We reflect on our results in the context of the knowledge-intensive nature of professional service work. We find that Yammer in the case company has become 1) an information-sharing channel, 2) a space for crowdsourcing ideas, 3) a place for finding expertise and solving problems and 4) a conversation medium for context and relationship building. We conclude by positioning ESN in the well-known 3-C model for classifying collaborative ICT.

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.

The ethical dilemmas of social networking services in classroom contexts

This chapter explores five ethical dilemmas associated with using Social Networking Sites (SNS) in classrooms. First, do we have the right to colonize or marginalize students’ out of school social networking practices in the classroom? Second, should we access students’ out of classroom virtual identities from their SNS in a classroom context? Third, should we be engaging students’ social networking in public performances of the curriculum? Fourth, are we prepared for recognising and responding to illicit activity in SNS? Fifth, do teachers understand the implications of exposing their out of school identities to their students who inhabit the same social network? The authors do not dispute that SNS in the classroom can be a rich site for learning, but they argue that the concept of ethics as a process of analyzing and respecting the other is essential if we are to responsibly engage with SNS in the classroom.

Online social capital : mood, topical and psycholinguistic analysis

Social media provides rich sources of personal information and community interaction which can be linked to aspect of mental health. In this paper we investigate manifest properties of textual messages, including latent topics, psycholinguistic features, and authors' mood, of a large corpus of blog posts, to analyze the aspect of social capital in social media communities. Using data collected from Live Journal, we find that bloggers with lower social capital have fewer positive moods and more negative moods than those with higher social capital. It is also found that people with low social capital have more random mood swings over time than the people with high social capital. Significant differences are found between low and high social capital groups when characterized by a set of latent topics and psycholinguistic features derived from blogposts, suggesting discriminative features, proved to be useful for classification tasks. Good prediction is achieved when classifying among social capital groups using topic and linguistic features, with linguistic features are found to have greater predictive power than latent topics. The significance of our work lies in the importance of online social capital to potential construction of automatic healthcare monitoring systems. We further establish the link between mood and social capital in online communities, suggesting the foundation of new systems to monitor online mental well-being.

Connectivity, online social capital, and mood : a Bayesian nonparametric analysis

Social capital indicative of community interaction and support is intrinsically linked to mental health. Increasing online presence is now the norm. Whilst social capital and its impact on social networks has been examined, its underlying connection to emotional response such as mood, has not been investigated. This paper studies this phenomena, revisiting the concept of “online social capital†in social media communities using measurable aspects of social participation and social support. We establish the link between online capital derived from social media and mood, demonstrating results for different cohorts of social capital and social connectivity. We use novel Bayesian nonparametric factor analysis to extract the shared and individual factors in mood transition across groups of users of different levels of connectivity, quantifying patterns and degree of mood transitions. Using more than 1.6 million users from Live Journal, we show quantitatively that groups with lower social capital have fewer positive moods and more negative moods, than groups with higher social capital. We show similar effects in mood transitions. We establish a framework of how social media can be used as a barometer for mood. The significance lies in the importance of online social capital to mental well-being in overall. In establishing the link between mood and social capital in online communities, this work may suggest the foundation of new systems to monitor online mental well-being.

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.