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.
Author: SocialXYZ
Crop Circles
I have finally had the chance to experiment with Google+! Yah!
My initial thoughts are positive. I like the idea of circles. They took a common term used in real life social settings and integrated it into their new social networking platform. While I just don’t see it competing with Facebook yet, I do think it will leave a mark. One thing I would caution is the idea of public profiles. They have already received a lot of backlash surrounding the Male / Female status and are now facing criticism over displaying of full names.
The amazing, and somewhat scary aspect of Google+, and the reason they probably require full names, is it’s ability to integrate with Google’s suite of applications, such as Picasa and Documents. It’s very efficient for anyone with a Gmail account to hop around apps and share different content.
Although I haven’t fooled around with it yet, I am really hoping for a tight coupling of Google+ with Blogger, which I believe is losing the name Blogger. This is because I am hoping to use Google+ as my next online learning community, or at least see how effective it can be in the classroom.
Integrating Blogging and Microblogging to Foster Learning and Social Interaction in Online Learning Communities (Abstract)
Below is the abstract for a recent paper I submitted. It is the first study, of hopefully many, that utilizes SocialXYZ as the experimental platform.
Abstract
In this paper we explore a combination of social technologies and their use within higher education. Our research builds atop ongoing design science research looking to expand an existing online learning community (OLC) used at our university. Our new design implements the latest version of Elgg, an online social learning platform and integrates it with the popular microblogging site Twitter. The overarching goal of this research is to measure the impact these technologies have on levels of learning and social interaction inside and outside the classroom. We measure this impact across two undergraduate classes taking upper-division information systems courses. Initial findings indicate that while the blogging component of our OLC continues to provide high levels of learning and social interaction in the classroom, microblogging, while effective in bringing new information into the classroom, failed to have a significant impact on learning or interaction.
Waiting to become friends with Google+
Well, Google never ceases to surprise. And this one came out of left field for me. I had no idea Google was even working on a revamped social network. I guess Orkut never took off in the U.S., although, according to Alexa, it does do surprisingly well in Brazil and India?
But like all of Google’s beta projects I am still awaiting an invitation for Google+. And now, as with Gmail, Voice and Wave, I feel like I am on the outskirts of the elite Google social circle. But for this project, I can understand their apprehension for releasing a social network to the general public. What better way to build up the user count while fostering social interactions. Rather than have a million single users join at once, friends will invite friends, who will invite friends. Makes sense, right? That’s the way Facebook took off. Having a general sense of exclusivity, assuming the project is attractive, can stir up interest.
For now, we’ll have to wait and see. Interesting things ahead for Google, I hope.
Fresh Start on SocialXYZ
Welcome to my first personal blog post in a while.
It may be somewhat ironic to require my students to post blog content for courses, while not maintaining a blog myself. But I do practice what I preach, or at least I used to… For a while I was blogging about my academic experience while getting my PhD. I blogged about my journeys across Europe and my experience driving the 5 freeway @ dawn to go surfing. I blogged about getting my haircut for the holidays and the trepidation of presenting research for the first time. This was back in 2007. Wow! But even before all that I was blogging about life and everything in between. I actually think that blog is still up since it’s on blogspot. I sometimes fear it will never go away.
But here I am with SocialXYZ, a domain I use to run different social media experiments in the classroom. And since this is more focused on this area of research, I will try and keep the material on or related to social media research. And I will do my best to keep the content current. If I find I am not able to maintain a steady influx of new material, I will deactivate the blog.
So here goes…
Oh, and for those wanderers wanting to know who is actually behind the blog, you can check register.com for the domain ownership, or you can check out http://brianthoms.com to read more about me…