Accepted for HICSS 45

Last term I introduced twitter into my course online learning platform (fsc.socialxyz.com) in upper-division information systems courses at SUNY Farmingdale. I collected data towards the end of the semester and turned a conference paper around in a matter of weeks (see http://blog.socialxyz.com/?p=23). Granted, I have been working within this area of research for some time and had most of my content analysis ready before I conducted my posttest. That said, I was excited about the positive feedback I received from reviewers and look forward to sharing my research with the larger IS community.

HICSS, which stands for the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, is the premier conference in my field and getting a paper accepted can be challenging. While some reviewers are primarily interested in new ideas and topic, other reviewers demand high quality research. And it’s hard to luck out and get only reviewers that are interested in researchers performing novel ideas. From my experience, and this is my fourth HICSS paper, meeting the criteria for HICSS can be more challenging than some journals.

This year the conference is located on Maui and takes place in January. Not bad, huh. One aspect missing from this blog, aside from an audience, is the lack of multimedia within my posts. Soon, hopefully, I will share some screenshots of my old and new software to give a better idea of the kind of experiments I am running.

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New Elgg Installation on fsc.SocialXYZ.com

I just finished most, if not all, the changes for my next experiment this fall.

My research took a slight detour after I found out that Google+ doesn’t play nice with Blogger, Google’s blogging engine. I thought it would work great in the classroom where students could decide who in their circles they wanted to share information with. Unfortunately, there would be a bit more development work on my end to get this to work correctly. This is especially a bummer because it’s always nice to be the first to experiment with a new technology. C’este la vie.

So, instead, I am going with the latest version of Elgg, with some personal add-ons of course. While I don’t want to dish out all of my changes, since it’s work in progress research, I am integrating the platform once again with Twitter and plan to create a more interactive Twitter experience for the classroom.

Should be fun. We’ll see.

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Google+ Instant

I recently noticed a pretty neat, yet scary, feature of Google+.

I was riding my bike through downtown Brooklyn when I stopped to take a picture of the Quay St. sign. Just the other week I was playing a friend in Words With Friends when he killed me on a triple triple, which is what I call hitting a triple letter on a triple word score, with the word QUAY. After he put me down about 100 points, I text him, “what is a quay?” Not to digress too much, I took this picture of Quay St. (find yours here: Quay St., NYC,NY).

I then noticed a notification on my Google+ account. Right now I don’t have too many friends, so I was curious. As it turns out, it was my picture of Quay St. uploaded to my Google+ account. The good news is that it doesn’t upload and share with your circles. The bad news is that it will upload almost any picture you take with your smartphone.

All in all, a pretty neat feature, but I can definitely see the downside…

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Android’s Market Share

I switched over to Android earlier this year and have fallen in love with the experience. It’s sad, but this is no overstatement. But this post isn’t about all that. I read recently that Android is approaching 50% of the market share for smartphones, yet it still remains well behind in applications development for its marketplace. While I see this as an amazing chance to develop Android-based applications, I can’t help but feel that critics are overly critical about this fact. To me, it seems it will only be a matter of time before app development for Android surpasses Apple if Android continues to dominate the OS market share as they currently do. Then again, maybe there’s something in the psychology of Apple users that make them more likely to purchase apps. I can’t help but wonder if it’s only to make Apple a more prosperous company. But who knows.

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