My experience with computers began in 1985 as I learned the beauty of Logo on a Packard Bell computer at the vocation school and the ability of a turtle to move through an electronic field by giving the turtle directions. I’ve enjoyed writing programs for computers in BASIC, simple JAVA and ActionScript for years. The connection to the world of cyberstudies came from my first experience on a bulletin board system (BBS) during my middle school years. I got to see virtual interactions on a textual level. Little did I know that I would be studying those interactions for my doctorate later in life.
During the first half of 2010, I decided to study the impact that social media was playing on traditional media channels. The feud between Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien about the Tonight Show was happening during the same time. The original plan was to conduct a multi-method study looking at...
(Writer's note: I would like to apologize for the next series of posts, as they are going to deal with my dissertation and may be slightly technical. I'll mark this post as a dissertation in the tags. Thanks in advance.) The development of a profile on an online social network...
I was happy that one of my articles was selected for Communication Currents, an amazing produced by the National Communication Association. Communication Currents is an online web magazine of the National Communication Association. This site is designed to translate current communication scholarship published in scholarly journals of the National Communication Association. Working from recently-published...
As Monty Python Flying Circus used to say, "Now for something completely different!" I am going to attempt to define two complex concepts and attempt to connect those concepts to the everyday world of social media. Those two terms are infotaxis and stigmergy. Both refer to a similar natural function, that is changing...
Microblogging (Jaiku, Twitter, Plurk, Tumblr, identi.ca, et al.) is considered a minimalist communication tool designed to fit the needs of an end-user. This channel allows the user to post information 140 characters at a time, which are called tweets. This configuration of characters could be as simple as textual information...
It seems that I've been focusing a lot on security and fraud on microblogging sites. However, there is more online than microblogging sites, despite my attraction to the concept. As a way of approaching cybersecurity, I finished reading the Center for Strategic and International Studies' Commission on Cyber Security for the...
The last three months of the research process will be the virtual ethnography research method. I will talk to ten students from each of the universities based on the interview pool or if there is attrition in the pool, a new group of students from those who took the survey...
The first method that will be used for this triangulation study will be a survey designed to look at the overall superstructure that defines this online social network. This survey will be designed to observe the individual habits of first-year students with regards to their Facebook usage and the individual's...
The purpose of this proposal is to describe the focus of my dissertation, which will be observing incoming traditional first-year students to Midwestern universities, whose hometowns are small towns and see how those first-year students use Facebook as a coping mechanism. The paper will begin with an in-depth discussion of...
To expand on the themes of involvement and engagement, Arend (2004) looks at how technology not only presents more opportunities for student-faculty interactions but also how those interactions promote a deeper and richer understanding of the course material. However, there is very little additional research citing the effect of technology...
