U.S. National Archives asks whether politicians’ tweets and blogs are ‘official government records’

Much of the Internet buzz surrounding today’s midterm elections in the U.S. revolves around voter participation and how social media may or may not impact turnout, reports ReadWriteWeb. But the increasing use of Web 2.0 and social media tools also impacts politicians and government employees as well. Many federal agencies have worked to encourage public participation and transparency with these new communication tools. But for one of the federal agency in particular, the rise of new forms of communications has other implications: Are all these new Facebook posts, YouTube videos, and tweets federal records?

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How to use higher education’s ‘new toy’: Social media

EDUCAUSE panelists encouraged attendees to search for social media staff on their own campus.
EDUCAUSE panelists encouraged attendees to search for social media staff on their own campus.

Campus technology officials in charge of social media efforts have come to a consensus: There are no social media experts, so keep experimenting with your school’s tweeting, linking, and posting until you’ve struck the right balance.

Using social media to communicate with students in the online arenas they most prefer—Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter—was a focal point at the annual EDUCAUSE conference in Anaheim, Calif., where 6,700 campus technology staff came together this week to discuss the latest in educational technology.

Robin Bradford Smail, known as a disruptive technologist at Penn State University, said during an Oct. 12 EDUCAUSE session that campus technology officials have to find and maintain a balance between being passive on Facebook and bombarding students with constant posts.…Read More

Facebook Places: Marketing tool or educational asset?

UK's Facebook Places ad campaign guides students to an educational web site.
UK's Facebook Places ad campaign guides students to an educational web site.

The University of Kentucky, if all goes according to the campus’s marketing plan, could pop up in 1.3 million Facebook news feeds during the fall semester—and students might just learn something about maintaining online privacy in the process.

The Lexington, Ky., university placed six-foot wooden Facebook Places logos in six campus locations with the heaviest foot traffic to encourage students to “check in” using Facebook’s geo-tagging application, which lets users show friends where they are—the campus library, for instance.

Places, which is similar to geo-tagging services Yelp, Gowalla, Booyah, and Foursquare, launched in August and drew skeptical reviews from many in higher education. Facebook users must opt into Places before the application displays the person’s location.…Read More

Students: Social media blackout eye-opening, ‘annoying’

Harrisburg students admit to finding ways around the school's social media ban.
Harrisburg students admit to finding ways around the school's social media ban.

Students at Harrisburg University, where technology officials recently deprived students of social media access for one week, said the restriction was a minor inconvenience for many on campus, and showed some students just how tethered to popular social sites they had become.

IT decision makers at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology in Pennsylvania–a campus of about 600 students established in 2001–banned access to Facebook, Twitter, AOL Instant Messenger, and MySpace through the school’s network during the week of Sept. 13 as a way of showing students how ingrained the technology has become in their everyday lives.

Harrisburg also hosted a panel of social media experts during the experimental week who discussed privacy and security issues in social media, how the technology is used to communicate with mass audiences, and how the professional world has adapted to the exponential popularity of sites like Facebook.…Read More

Social media site an ‘academic supplement’ to Facebook

The new CampusLive will let students migrate their Facebook information.
The new CampusLive will let students migrate their Facebook information.

Instead of a Facebook news feed cluttered with tidbits about friends’ FarmVille progress, Boris Revsin wants a social media site that alerts college students to the latest in academic news from their peers—information that could connect students and form study groups.

Since 2007, CampusLive.com has been a one-stop shop for college students looking for local eats, perusing campus headlines, and connecting to their school’s library.

And Revsin, a former University of Massachusetts Amherst student and CEO of CampusLive, said the site’s next iteration will allow users to pull their Facebook profiles into a more academically-focused site dedicated to campus goings on.…Read More

Beware of fake Facebook ‘dislike’ button

Lots of people have clamored for a “dislike” button on Facebook, which so far only officially allows people to “like” content on its site. Now, some social-media spoilers are trying to turn the public’s desire for that dislike button into a scam, CNN reports. Graham Cluley, a senior technology consultant at the British security firm Sophos, wrote in an Aug. 16 blog post that fake dislike buttons are going viral on Facebook. Watch out for posts that look like this, he says: “I just got the Dislike button, so now I can dislike all of your dumb posts lol!!” That statement on Facebook is typically followed with a link, Cluley writes, that takes people to a fake Facebook application. Instead of installing a dislike button, Cluley says, the application uses a person’s social network to continue spreading the fake program. “If you do give the app permission to run, it silently updates your Facebook status to promote the link that tricked you in the first place, thus spreading the message virally to your Facebook friends and online contacts,” he writes. Cluley says the fake dislike button is part of a recent trend of Facebook scams whose titillating links play on tech memes and themes from pop culture. Typically, such schemes are designed to steal information from internet users. That information then can be sold to other parties. The scams also can be used to co-opt an internet user’s social network contacts. If you accidentally installed the fake application, click on the “account” button at the top right of the Facebook home screen. Navigate to the option that says “application settings,” and disable the fake “dislike” application…

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Companies turn to social media for grant-giving

Companies are increasingly using social networking sites as a means of determining grant winners.
Companies are increasingly using social networking sites as a means of determining grant winners.

As celebrities, politicians, and students alike increasingly use social media to stay connected, education experts say they have noticed a growing number of companies turning to social media to determine grant award winners.

And education is not alone. Sherrie A. Madia, director of communications for the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, said the notion of using social media for social good is growing across all industries.

“In part, this trend is growing as companies see for themselves what ‘doing well and doing good’ can do for their brand, and social media is often the best means of promoting community outreach, based on its inherent ability to reach communities in new and more personal ways,” said Madia, who is the author of The Social Media Survival Guide: Everything You Need to Know to Grow Your Business Exponentially with Social Media.…Read More

How online research can make the grade

Not too long ago, the golden rules for high school and college students turning to the web as a research tool were simple: Treat digital content that’s never been in print with suspicion. Be careful what you Google. And thou shalt not touch Wikipedia. But the web has grown up a bit in the past few years, and the presence of digital research journals, fact-finding social media tools, textbook exchanges, and eReaders have made it a much more complicated landscape for students, CNET reports. When things have shaken out, it might be a world where free-for-all online information hubs are accepted—or, if proponents of “collaborative knowledge” have their way, even embraced. “With more and more people using (Wikipedia), it has done a better job of being able to self-correct than in the Wild West days of when it first started up and you had no idea who was vouching for any of this stuff,” said Chad O’Connor, a consultant and adjunct professor of communications at Emerson College. Wikipedia should not be used as a primary source, Wikimedia Foundation spokesman Jay Walsh acknowledged. But he added that the foundation has started an experimental outreach with some U.S. universities to bring faculty and students into the corps of Wikipedia contributors, specifically with regard to articles about public policy—one of the site’s more contentious areas. Meanwhile, just as the academic community has started to accept the inevitability of sites like Wikipedia, the web is also about to foist what might be the biggest complexity it has encountered since the advent of the free-for-all encyclopedia: As the school year starts, the recent proliferation of question-and-answer sites—like the brainy Quora and the soon-to-be-everywhere Facebook Questions—might prove to be students’ next last-ditch time-saver and teachers’ next digital bogeyman…

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Study: Students do care about Facebook privacy

Frequent Facebook users are more likely to change their privacy settings.
Frequent Facebook users are more likely to change their privacy settings.

A close look at college students’ reaction to Facebook privacy policies revealed concern about online identities as news outlets pushed the issue to the forefront with increasing coverage in 2009 and 2010, according to a report released this month.

Eszter Hargittai, an associate professor at Northwestern University’s communication studies department, and Danah Boyd, a researcher for Microsoft Research and a fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, found that most Facebook members altered their privacy settings in the past year while privacy advocates railed against gaps in the social media site’s identification security.

Hargittai and Boyd based their report on a survey of University of Illinois Chicago students conducted during the 2008-09 academic year and the 2009-10 school year. The researchers had a response rate of 45 percent among more than 1,000 students surveyed. The researchers’ report is published in the journal First Monday.…Read More

Google’s march toward social networking

Google this week confirmed its acquisition of online entertainment company Slide, PC World reports. The purchase rehashed speculation that the search giant is interested in working its way into social media, possibly with a game-centered service called “Google Me.” Although there isn’t any word on specific product details David Glazer, engineering director at Google confirms the company will invest more effort to make its services more “socially aware” in a recent blog post. This shouldn’t come as any surprise to anyone. Google has repeatedly expressed interest in the past year, starting with the announcement of Google Wave at the 2009 I/O Developer Conference. If Google plans to dethrone Facebook (or at least become a contender in the world of social media) it needs to learn a few things from its past social endeavors, most of which haven’t ended so well. However, it’s clear that Google is keeping at this mission…

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