ICTlogy

Akiko Hemmi, Sian Bayne, Ray Land
Research methods for Web 2.0 practices: investigating e-learning using Web 2.0 in higher education

The importance of social context when writing/contributing to a wiki, e.g. others’ consent to be written about. Same, even more, when concerning changing others’ writings.

Second Life seems more suitable for informal chat than for exchange/creation of information and knowledge. Indeed, it is not a really reliable tool at this stage.

Identity issues in Second Life and Facebook and how you present your self (Goffman) in virtual realities.

Paolo Lattanzio, Mauro Sandrini
e-learning and web 2.0 – learning spaces for people or machines

The Web 2.0 is not, as it changes and evolves along time by using it.

Possibilities of strong personalization of learning.

Not intended to destroy the old methods, but enhance, complement them.

Possibility of dialog, not a monologue: blogs, podcasts, web radio, etc.

Activate the teachers’ peer community, sharing experiences, resources, etc. Available content should ease the updating of own content.

Not just reuse content, but also the tools.

By using Web 2.0 apps, students also learn not only to collaborate but how to use some tools.

Michael Thelwall
How do general social networking sites embed in the Web?

A hyperlink comparison of 20 social networking sites: hyperlinking is an endorsement to a site.

LexiURL Searcher

It looks that the sites with heavy blog component are more linked than you’d expect by their size/traffic. Blog seems to be a key component in the linking nature of Web 2.0.

Flavour: for each site, the flavour is the top-level domain that most frequently links to it, compared to the other sites. e.g. Facebook is linked by more .edu sites than any other kind of top level domain, while MySpace has the .com as the main referrer and Bebo with .uk.

57% of the links come from personal websites, most of them here’s my website and here’s my personal profile in Facebook/MySpace/whatever, 33% from commercial (especially music and film industry), 3% from educational.

LiveJournal and MySpace have, between them, much more shared links than any other platform with any other one.

Two very differentiate kinds of members in MySpace according to days since last entered the site: frequent users vs. created account and never entered back.

Female users more likely to be “here for” friendship and male users more likely to be “here for” dating (but only a minority). Males and females both preferred to have more female friends and Top 8 friends. Fremales preferred a greater proportion of female Top 8 friends. So, especially in the case of guys, does MySpace really reflects (as it’s been said) offline relationships?

Quite a usual use of swearing in youngsters (16 to 19 y.o.) sites on MySpace, more on guys.

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