Facebook frequency of use and activities survey questions
I’ve had a lot of requests for permission to use my Facebook frequency of use and activities survey questions. I am happy to share these survey questions as long as they are cited as coming from :
Junco, R. (2012). The relationship between frequency of Facebook use, participation in Facebook activities, and student engagement. Computers & Education, 58(1), 162-171.
Facebook frequency – I use two different ways to measure frequency of use: 1) Average time spent on Facebook per day and 2) Number of times Facebook is checked per day. Note that if you are relating these to outcome measures, you will probably get different results for time and checking (there is more detail about this in this paper and this one). My reason for using a continuous measure of time spent on Facebook is simple. Using categorical measures (i.e., 1-2 hours, 3-4 hours, etc.) presupposes an underlying distribution in your data that may not actually exist. Plus, you can always convert a continuous variable to a categorical, but not vice-versa. I recognize that using such fine-grained options could be problematic; however, survey methods are the most efficient in collecting these data (stay tuned for one of my future projects that seeks to remedy the problems inherent in employing surveys to collect usage data). You might have noticed that the “time spent on” question is worded in a way to include more stems than just Facebook– I used a few additional stems (i.e., searching for information, email, etc.). Feel free to add your own.
Facebook activities - Because the types of Facebook activities change with the addition or deletion of features, I used a novel method to come up with these 14 items. I posted a public status update stating: ‘‘I need your help for my next research project. What are the things you do on Facebook?’’ The items submitted by 39 of my Facebook friends were collated and compiled into a non-overlapping list of 14 items. These 14 items were shared with two separate groups of undergraduate students for input, revised and posted on Facebook for further comments. All of the items from the original list were kept, and most of them were edited for clarity and relevance.
You can download a pdf of the questions here. If you end up using these questions in your own research, please send me an email and let me know. You may also be interested in my colleague, Nicole Ellison’s Facebook Intensity Scale.
Twitter 101: Best Practices in Using Twitter in the Classroom Infographic
Almost a year ago, I posted a call to collaborate with graphic designers interested in creating research-based infographics. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you know that I’ve been fortunate to work with a number of graphic designers who have converted my research into infographics.
Here is yet another one in this series. This one is based on our paper, Putting Twitter to the test: assessing outcomes for student collaboration, engagement, and success. In the paper, we compared two ways to use Twitter in the classroom: as an unguided back channel or integrating it into a course in educationally-relevant ways (ways that made sense based on the course goals). The results gave us comparative data in order to be able to make recommendations about best practices in using Twitter in the classroom.
I’d like to point out that I’m a real stickler about using the term “best practices.” It’s a concept we toss around a lot in higher education. To me, a “best practice” is only something that has been supported by research. Alas, most of the time that we talk about “best practices” in higher ed, we’re focusing on what someone thinks is a “good idea.” So here you go… some data to support best practices in using Twitter in the college classroom.
A look inside my academic job search
For those of you who are regular readers of my blog, this post is very different than what you are accustomed to seeing here. While I usually keep my posts professional (I’ve often joked that writing for my blog is like writing mini journal articles), this post is incredibly personal. I’ve been thinking about writing it for some time, but quite frankly, haven’t had the guts to do it because it’s “not the way we do things” in academia. Interestingly enough, I tend to rail against the notion of doing things in certain ways just because that’s “how we’ve always done it.”
Last week, I was having a conversation with a close friend about my job search and she astutely noted that while I’m quite transparent online when it comes to many other areas of my career, I’ve kept my job search a secret. While her statement wasn’t the impetus for this post, it was certainly the reason I decided to write it sooner rather than later.
You see, I’ve been on the job market for a few years now. This is no surprise to the people who are close to me (as well as my department chairs). I am grateful for the support my institution has granted me over the years, but as I continue to specialize in my field, I am finding that my current position is no longer the right fit. While I’m considered faculty, 75% of my time is allocated to being a student affairs administrator at a non-research focused university. Although that’s been rewarding, as my career has evolved I have focused more on my research and with that has been a related desire to teach more and to mentor graduate students. Even though my research and writing time is limited by my administrative duties, I’ve been able to publish a great deal in top-tier journals. So, I’ve applied for many faculty positions in the last few years. I’d love to be in a department at a research institution where my colleagues are also conducting research in similar areas. I envision collaborating with other faculty members within my home department and across departments (as I’ve already done in some of my research projects). I also envision teaching graduate courses and advising, mentoring, and collaborating with graduate students to share my passion for teaching and research. Furthermore, a research institution would have the support structures in place for other research-related activities like obtaining grants and collecting large-scale data sets.
Now here comes the part that might come as a surprise—I have received rejection after rejection for these positions. Most of the time, these rejections come without ever getting an interview. In a few rare cases, I’ve actually gotten campus interviews to later learn that someone more junior or much more senior had been hired. Even more surprising is that when I have gotten an interview, I’ve been given positive feedback about how well I did. And herein lies the disconnect—while having had much success with my research, I have had no success at finding a new job. In the past year alone, I’ve applied to ten positions, and because of feedback from a few trusted colleagues I even expanded my search beyond student affairs, higher education, and counselor education programs.
I’ve considered many possible explanations, some of which include personality (It would be easy to understand if I was a jerk, but I’m not—people actually like working with me), institutional type (it’s not easy to go from a teaching institution to a research one), my current position as mainly an administrator, and the fact that I’m a full professor and that committees might think I want to come in at that rank. Of all of the possibilities I’ve considered, I’m beginning to consider what might be the likeliest explanation—the fact that I am the only person doing this type of research in education. As far as I know, there are no other educators examining the academic and psychosocial impact of social media. You would think this would be intriguing to a department or a search committee; however, it makes me an outlier. Most of you reading this blog “get it” when it comes to using social media in productive ways; however, I’m guessing that most of the people evaluating me on search committees don’t. My take is that my work is seen as more of a curiosity. I also wonder whether some may think that my work would lead to major shifts in academia and/or the loss of faculty jobs. But to be quite honest, those are only guesses. It’s clear that my research is different than what others are doing in my field, and that very well could be the explanation.
I realize that sharing this is risky especially since academics don’t talk publicly about their job search. But quite frankly, what’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like a potential employer is going to read this post and not hire me—that’s already been happening well before I wrote this. Besides, whether I like it or not (and to be clear, I don’t), the field of higher education may be trying to tell me something—and it may be time for me to look elsewhere and begin checking out opportunities in the private sector. If you happen to know of an organization looking for someone like me, please feel free to share this post and my cv with them.
If what I’ve written resonates with you, I’d love to hear from you. I’d also love to hear from you if you have some feedback to share or have a story to share about your experiences with the academic job search process. Please leave a comment and I promise I’ll reply to every one.
StudentAffairs.com podcast Interview with Rey Junco
Last week I chatted with Stuart Brown from StudentAffairs.com for the student affairs forum podcast. We spoke about:
- Variation in technology skills even among students who are “digital natives.”
- Digital inequalities and how these inequalities are reproduced throughout a student’s educational career.
- How digital inequalities in technology use can put students from minority racial/ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds at a disadvantage not just in college but after they graduate.
- Ways that student affairs professionals can help all students be on a “level playing field” with technology skills.
- My research on how Facebook use is related to student academic performance.
- Some of my latest research showing what might be driving the negative relationship between Facebook use and overall GPA.
- Ideas for future research projects (check it out, graduate students!).
You can listen to the 22-minute long podcast here:
You can download the podcast by right clicking on this link and choosing “save as.”
Achievement not yet unlocked: Badges for learning project looking for funding
A while ago I posted about the proposal Game dynamics in the classroom: Badges to improve student engagement and learning in large lecture courses we submitted to the Digital Media and Learning Badges for Learning competition. We were delighted to see how much buzz our proposal generated online (here’s a post on Edudemic about our proposal and a screenshot of a Storify containing some of the tweets I received) and were pleased to hear from many of you who were interested in our project. Unfortunately, we were notified that DML is not going to fund our proposal. I wish I could tell you why; however, in their email they stated “due to volume we are unable to provide feedback on individual projects.”
We think ours is a good project that leverages badges as well as game dynamics to solve a common problem in higher education– getting students to be engaged in large-lecture courses. As you might imagine, we need funding to get this project off the ground. Because the proposal is already online and because I believe there is wisdom in the crowd, I’m writing this post in the hopes that someone in a position to fund a project of this nature might read this. If you are interested in funding this project, please email me by clicking this link. If not, please spread this post through your networks– tweet, reteweet, +1, wall posts, etc.
To summarize, the project will do four things:
- In partnership with SCVNGR, we will develop a badging system that can be used by other universities.
- We will implement the badging system in a large-lecture course. The system and our protocol will use game dynamics based on research-supported strategies to improve student engagment.
- We will evaluate the effectiveness of our intervention by using a controlled experimental design. We will collect data on student engagement, attendance, and course grades in randomly assigned experimental and control classrooms. We’ll also run focus groups to collect qualitative data. The control classrooms will not use the badging system but a instead do the same activities through other methods.
- We will develop and make freely available educational materials so that others may integrate the badging system into any kind of large-lecture course.
Here is the project summary:
The goal of this project is to create and evaluate a badging system for learning in order to increase college student academic engagement and improve class attendance and academic performance. We hypothesize that we can improve college student academic outcomes by combining Location Based Services (LBS) with a badging system employing game dynamics and integrating it in an educationally-relevant way in a large-lecture course.
You can download the full proposal PDF file here which includes details about our methods. If you are interested in funding this project, please email me and I can send you the proposed budget.
Will iTextbooks increase student engagement? Not really.
Over at Wired, Tim Carmody wrote a great piece about Apple’s latest foray into the education market – digital textbooks via the iBooks 2 app. Tim hits the nail on the head in his introduction (emphasis mine):
Engagement is a big word in education. It combines both objective participation and subjective emotion. It’s one of the few psychological terms in education that links students, teachers and content. So it’s not surprising that in promoting the iPad as a tool for education, Apple touted the device’s ability to engage students.
Because they’re so engaging: okay, let’s just drop the bull and say it, because they’re cool
Tim understands what Apple and most reporters don’t know or like to gloss over: That there is nothing engaging about iTextbooks in relation to the important interpersonal engagement that we’re striving for in order to increase student motivation, participation, and academic outcomes (here is a great article reviewing student engagement and related research).
There’s no doubt that iTextbooks are intrapersonally engaging or put another way, interactive. However, just because something is interactive does not mean that it is engaging. Although I’m not endorsing them either, at least Inkling has the “social learning network” feature that allows students and instructors to carry on a conversation about book content. Certainly, a step in the right engagement direction.
Some of my research on Facebook and Twitter illustrates the idea of “engaging” tech vs. actual engagement: using an “engaging” system like Facebook doesn’t predict much of the variance in real-world engagement; however, using it in certain ways does. Learning outcomes come about not because of the particular technology being used, but because of how that technology is used to support sound pedagogy. Certainly, some technologies will be better suited for certain activities than others (for instance, Twitter lends itself better to ongoing synchronous and asynchronous conversations than email).
Educators will often become enamored by new technologies and adopt them with the underlying assumption that technology in and of itself must be good for learning (for a great review, see the Outcomes section of this paper). We see this type of hype with almost every new educational technology tool that is released. Take for example iPad initiatives at a growing number of universities: there’s no data to show that having students adopt iPads leads to better learning outcomes. So why adopt them on such a widespread scale? The only reason that I can tell is because they are cool.
Now, there is nothing wrong with the “cool factor.” Doing traditional educational activities with a shiny new toy can improve student motivation, a phenomenon I liken to Jedi mind tricks (“these are not the boring lectures you are looking for”). Unfortunately, the effect of the cool factor is short-lived when it comes to promoting positive educational outcomes. When all students have iPads (which is presumptuous to assume- I’ll save my rant about how iTextbooks will widen digital inequalities for another time), reading iTextbooks will be just like any other boring non-engaging assignment that students have to complete in isolation. In other words, the coolness wears off and the interactivity becomes a routine part of the process.
Of course we’ll never know how well new technologies work unless we try them. But in addition to trying them, we must integrate them in educationally-purposeful ways and also assess how integrating them in these ways affects student outcomes in comparison to other tools (in the case of iTextbooks, reasonable comparisons would be regular textbooks, other forms of digital books, and interactive websites). Put another way, we can (and should) be excited about the possibility of how new technologies might enhance learning; however, we must be mindful of evaluating what works and more importantly, what doesn’t.
College students prefer to use Facebook in their courses
Over the last year, I’ve conducted or collaborated on a number of studies examining the use of social media in the classroom. One thing has been clear from our observations in those studies: when given the choice of a number of social technologies to use as part of a course, students will overwhelmingly choose Facebook. This week, I finished analyzing new data showing this to be the case.
These data are from a follow-up to a Twitter study we conducted a few years ago using first-year students. We interviewed these students a year after the original study. While we found some interesting things about their preferences for technology use including their use of learning management systems, I don’t want to spoil the surprise as we’re writing those results up for an upcoming paper. When we asked students what they thought about using Twitter or Ning in their courses, they overwhelmingly responded with the ideas exemplified in these quotes:
I think [using Facebook] would’ve been easier and a little more comfortable for people because I think pretty much everyone in my class had a Facebook and nobody had either one of these things.
I think that [Facebook] is a lot easier for people to use and since people generally get on there every day they are going to see the stuff and invites a lot quicker than others.
Many of them went on to say how they independently used Facebook to organize study groups, to ask questions of fellow classmates, and to catch up on missed work.
Why do students prefer Facebook over other technologies?
Almost every student in our sample gave us a variant of the same answer: all their friends/classmates are on Facebook, and it’s easy to use. In other words, Facebook has the user base in order to make academic conversations useful. Plus, since students are “always” on Facebook, it’s easy to see when new comments are made to a post from a class. Some of my research has shown that how students use Facebook is sometimes more important than time spent on the site in terms of grades and student engagement. Therefore, college faculty have an opportunity to engage students using Facebook and to help them use the site for educational good.
One way to use Facebook as part of a course.
I encourage faculty members who want to integrate Facebook into their courses to set up a Facebook group and use the group to continue class discussions, allow students to ask questions, and encourage students to post and comment on class-related links (news articles, etc.). In a paper that will be published shortly, we make the case for faculty to actively participate in such groups to increase student involvement and improve course performance.
Badges for Learning
Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about using badging systems to support student learning. There is great potential for using badging systems to add a game layer to learning in the traditional classroom, thereby increasing student engagement and learning outcomes.
Last year at SxSWi, Seth Priebatsch from SCVNGR gave a keynote (video) about adding a game layer on top of the world. If you don’t have much time, I’d recommend skipping to the part about game mechanics and engagement in education which starts at 10:30. Seth’s talk sparked a number of ideas for me, one of which grew to be our proposal Game Dynamics in the Classroom: Badges to Improve Student Engagement and Learning in Large Lecture Courses for the Digital Media + Learning Research Competition.
The gist (straight from our proposal):
The goal of this project is to create and evaluate a badging system for learning in order to increase college student academic engagement and improve class attendance and academic performance. We hypothesize that we can improve college student academic outcomes by combining Location Based Services (LBS) with a badging system employing game dynamics and integrating it in an educationally-relevant way in a large-lecture course at The University of Florida.
I’m really excited that we were able to partner with SCVNGR to develop a badging system for this project. If the project gets funded, we’ll use an experimental design to evaluate the impact of integrating our badging system and related game dynamics into large lecture courses. As outcomes, we’ll measure differences in student engagement, attendance, and academic performance between the experimental group and the control group. Here are our methods:
Research design
Before the semester begins, university students registered for a large-lecture introductory course will be randomly assigned to either a control section or an experimental section. Both the control and experimental sections will be taught by the same instructor and will follow the same schedule in the presentation of course material. Each section will contain at least 200 students for a total of 400 participants. The Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects will approve research proceduresExperimental Section
Students in the experimental section will use their Android or iOS devices to engage in academic challenges in order to earn badges. Students will check in to the classroom after indicated class sessions. Once they check in, they will be presented with a challenge that involves answering five questions about that day’s lecture, developed in consultation with the course instructor. Students will receive a point for each question they answer correctly. They will also receive points for checking in to the class location, posting pictures of their notes, and posting questions about the day’s lecture. Additionally, students will receive points towards badges by participating in relevant challenges outside of class, including “social check-ins” with a study group, visiting a professor/TA’s office or supplementary instruction session, or checking into the tutoring center.When a student accumulates a pre-determined amount of points, she or he will receive a badge. Students may earn one badge for each week of the course. At the end of the semester, students will receive course extra credit based on the number of badges they have earned.
Control Section
Students in the control section will have the opportunity to answer the same questions as the experimental group; however, these questions will be presented as quizzes using TurningTechnologies ResponseWare. ResponseWare allows students to submit answers by using either their mobile phones or their laptop computers. The quizzes will include the same content and be administered at the same time as the experimental group. Control group students will also be able to complete the other challenges, but they will be presented as extra credit opportunities accompanied by manual tracking methods and a traditional scoring rubric equivalent to the badge system.
You can read the entire proposal here. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this project. Please feel free to leave a comment below or on the proposal page at the DML site.
[Update 2/13/12: Our proposal was not selected for funding by DML; however, we are still looking for funding. Please read this post and share it through your networks.]
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Why I don’t trust that Facebook will keep your child’s information private
Privacy: Time and time again, Facebook has been notorious for tricking users into sharing more of their personal information. And yes, I mean tricking and no, I’m not being overly dramatic here as I’ll point out below. Since the Internet has a short memory, let’s briefly review some of these issues:
Because of all this, one can infer that Facebook has had a deliberate disregard for privacy of its users. Now imagine similar privacy bait-and-switches with children – who are less equipped to understand what is happening and to protect themselves from having their information shared with more people than they intended. And while in my original piece I wrote about how I’m not as concerned about a stranger taking advantage of a child on Facebook as I am about other things, such privacy breeches certainly increase the chances that a person with ill intentions will use the information for their own benefit at the expense of the child.
For these reasons, I don’t trust that Facebook has my best interest in mind and I certainly don’t trust that they’ll have the best interest of children under 13 in mind… and neither should you.
Tags: children, facebook, opinon, parenting, privacy, social media, students, technology, teens, youth