Month: September 2011

Now I feel I am beating HICSS 45 to death… And I have another HICSS post in draft… And it is over three months away… But I just got the statistics on this year’s Advances in Teaching and Learning Technologies track. The total number of paper submissions was 32, of which 13 (or 40%) were accepted for inclusion in HICSS 45. That’s not a bad acceptance rate for a conference and makes it more competitive than a lot of journal publications out there.

Here is a link to this year’s overview of the Advances in Teaching and Learning Track: hicss45-overview.

 

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I think Google+ is great. Ever since I abandoned Facebook a year ago, I have been wanting to share content with my closest friends. My problem with Facebook, at least at the time, was that I could only share content with everyone I was connected with. With Google+ I can create dedicated circles and target my content. After all, I am a different person when I am with my family, different when I am with my friends and different when I am in the workplace. Do these worlds merge on occasion, of course, and it is always nice to share across social circles. However, I think the approach Google+ has taken reflects this real-world phenomenon.

That said, I think a major hurdle with Google+ right now is the public profile. Currently Google requires that members have a public profile with some basic information, such as a name. The problem with this idea is that anyone can place you in their circle. I was just added by someone 1) whom I have never met and 2) whom none of my friends have ever met.  This notion is similar to how Twitter functions, but it is more alarming since 1) everyone on Google+ must have a public facing profile and 2) Google+ hopes to integrate every aspect of your web identity from documents to photos. It is possible to block users and I have already blocked my share of social spies, as I call them.

I still see a lot of potential with Google+ and I hope it begins to pickup more steam. I have been reading that, although the initial buzz has been great, the usage has dropped off considerably. I also hope to see a better integration across Google products such as YouTube, Blogger and Documents.

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A brief update to my previous post, New Elgg Installation on fsc.SocialXYZ.com.

I am conducting a very interesting study that looks to compare a hybrid class with an online class. The course title is the same, but I have the feeling the perceptions of the software will be quite drastic. Additionally, I have the sneaking suspicion that students in my online course will be turned off by the initial complexity of linking SocialXYZ with Twitter. Granted, the process is not exactly straightforward, but I did my best to minimize the number of integration steps, by allowing students to tweet directly from SocialXYZ.

That said, I feel the start of the semester went nicely. I currently have 50 active participants posting interesting content to the site. From these 50 participants, 45 have helped complete a pretest, which is a fantastic response rate, especially for my online class. The survey is anonymous and I cannot identify who responds and who doesn’t, so the fact that I was able to achieve a 90% response rate is amazing. As for the data, I have no intentions of looking at it prior to the end of the semester, but I look forward to the responses…

 

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