All Posts Tagged With: "social media"

Students at Nipissing U. early to embrace trend

Students have a new online obsession. Quickmemes.com allows anyone to add their own funny captions to photos of familiar Internet stars, like Rebecca Black, before sharing them on Facebook.

The trend is starting to spread, but one community’s Facebook walls are already littered with Quick Memes. There are more than 1,300 “likes” on the unofficial Nipissing University Memes Facebook page. That’s a lot for a school with just 4,500 students. The page for the North Bay, Ontario school has become a place to share both points of pride (the fries at campus pub The Wall) and common complaints (transportation to the hilltop campus). Here are just a few of the dozens of memes from the Nipissing page that will make you laugh and then share, just like that Rebecca Black video.

Share your Quick Memes with us in the comments section!

Follow @JoshDehaas and @maconcampus on Twitter.

Some activities may lead to lower marks

Photo by Spencer E Holtaway on Flickr

It’s common to use Facebook as a scapegoat for poor academic performance. That’s because a few small studies have shown that grades are lower among students who spend more time on the social media site. The assumption has always been that more time spent on Facebook translates to less time spent studying, which leads to lower grades.

But a newer, bigger U.S. study has found that Facebook time and study time are only weakly related. It takes many extra hours of posting and chatting before grades start to slip. What’s more, although the new study found negative relationships between grades and certain types of Facebook activities, other types of activities appear to be a associated with higher grades.

Continue reading Can you blame Facebook for your bad grades? Maybe.

Website offers profs group therapy

Photo by Laura Mills

June Madeley is annoyed with the increasingly rude demands she gets from students at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John. Ten years ago, it was common for them to see her during office hours when they had a question. “Now there’s an expectation that we’ll answer their emails immediately and meet them whenever there’s a good time for them.” And as surely as the leaves pile up on campus each October, the communications professor knows her inbox will soon fill with complaints about mid-terms scheduled for the week after the Thanksgiving holiday. “There are a lot of people who feel they can’t make the exam because of travel arrangements,” she says. “And others who think it’s unfair that they have to study that weekend.”

But when Madeley gets frustrated, she doesn’t fire off a snotty email to the student. She logs on to “That’s ‘Professor’ Uptight to You, Johnny,” a Facebook group with 297 members, all of them teaching at universities and colleges. The members-only site is a place where university educators can vent in the form of steaming emails they wish they could write to their students but can’t because that would be, well, rude. Madeley, who says she hasn’t posted yet, enjoys reading the rants from her colleagues. The site is run by Khrystyne Keane, a Connecticut-based editor for a non-profit group, who took over its administration as a favour to a professor friend. The logo—a unicorn standing under a rainbow—is a jab at students, some of whom feel they are every bit as special as the fabled one-horned horse and the multicoloured arc.

The posts are all written to anonymous Janeys and Johnnies, but they share one trait: carefully crafted sarcasm. “Dear Johnny, I suspect that if you had spent as much time and effort on your last assignment as you did on the long flaming email you just sent me, this whole ‘conversation’ would never have happened,” reads one. “Dear Janey, I want to assure you that we didn’t do anything important in class. We just stared out the window for three hours in silence,” reads another.

Nothing riles a professor more than asking about material covered in a skipped lecture. But Joey O’Kane, a vice-president of the University of New Brunswick Student Union, thinks it’s no big deal. He also thinks it’s reasonable to expect email responses from profs within 24 hours, preferably 12. “Professors have a pretty good gig,” he says. “You put in some office hours, you teach for a few hours and then you end up with a decent paycheque, so taking 10 minutes out of your day to respond to a few emails . . . I don’t think that’s asking too much.”

Kevin Maness, another Facebook member from Eastern University in Pennsylvania, recalls a student who emailed him a couple of weeks after the last semester ended and asked if there was anything he could do to increase his grade because he had been “too busy” playing basketball. Incredulous, Maness wanted to shoot off a caustic retort. Long before he had even heard about That’s “Professor” Uptight, someone else had addressed the same complaint with a post that read: “Dear Johnny, Just tell me the grade you want and I’ll change it in the book, because it doesn’t really matter anyway.” After joining the group last month, Maness has found it to be “great group therapy.”

When Maness attended the University of Pennsylvania in the early ’90s, he accepted that professors would challenge him. In return for doing the coursework, he was rewarded with the grade he had earned. Now, if he hands out a C-minus “it’s almost like a complete shock to them.”

So why the attitude? In their book Lowering Higher Education: The Rise of Corporate Universities and the Fall of Liberal Education, University of Western Ontario sociologists James Côté and Anton Allahar say it started when higher education became purely a financial exchange. Funding pressures forced universities to accept as many students as possible, even those who weren’t suited to academics, says Côté. That crowds lecture halls with students who shouldn’t be there.

At the very least, one educator feels students should learn to mind their manners. At the University of Minnesota, law professor Michele Goodwin added “civility” to her course requirements this September. “Failure to follow this guideline will affect your final grade,” she wrote in the class syllabus, explaining that emails should include the basic salutation “Dear Professor Goodwin” and not “Hey Prof.”

She even assigned practice email as homework. “It’s a bit awkward for professors to think, wow, this is actually my job now?” says Goodwin, who blogs for industry publication The Chronicle of Higher Education, “but it’s necessary.” If the new rules don’t work out, at least she has a place to commiserate. The professor can always join That’s “Professor” Uptight to You, Johnny.

Editor’s Note: I wrote this story for the print edition of Maclean’s. As both Profs. Maness and Magatha have pointed out in the comments section, it should have included more nuance. For one, I should have made it more clear that every single professor I spoke to for this piece exuded passion for teaching. Indeed, research shows that North American professors work on average around 55 hours per week and many of those hours are dedicated to helping students learn beyond the classroom—something they get little credit for. The profs. also made it clear that there are many students who don’t fit the stereotype of entitled. I agree. While it’s a challenge to decide what to include in the space allotted, I should have done a better job. I also want to note that there was a factual error in this story that was introduced in the editing process. Maness did not read a complaint “months earlier” from another professor who sarcastically offered to change a student’s grade. That was merely what he said he might have written had he know about the page at the time.

Essays are unoriginal, says student aid official

The University of Iowa is offering a $38,000 scholarship to its business school for the best tweet by a prospective student who explains why he or she will make a good MBA hire, reports USA Today. That’s right, it’s a 140-character application that pays $271 per letter.

Jodi Schafer, the University of Iowa’s director of MBA admissions and financial aid, told the newspaper that application essays were “becoming unoriginal,” She explained that, “we’re hoping that incorporating social media in the process will help bring back some of that creativity.” Students can include a link to anything they like in their tweet, including blogs, videos or Facebook accounts.

The University of Iowa isn’t the first school to eschew the 800-word entry essay in favour of the Tweet. Kentucky Fried Chicken received 2,800 applications for it’s $20,000 Twitter scholarship last year. To enter, students explained why they deserved the cash. The $20,000 winning entry was by a student who didn’t even use all 140 characters. She wrote that the scholarship “is the secret ingredient missing from my recipe for success.”

Three tweeting jokers will retire

The infamous Tweeter behind the @wstrngirl account has finally been revealed. In fact, it was not one person, but three female friends, reports University of Western Ontario student newspaper, The Gazette. Students were kept guessing about the source of the tweets, which entertained more than 2,600 followers with funny two-liners that were supposedly from the mind of a stereotypical “Western girl.” For example, on March 5 they wrote that ”the Ceeps line-up has affected what time I take my birth control pills,” referring to a pick-up bar near campus. On  Dec. 7, when the school was closed for a storm, they wrote “thank god for my cashmere snuggie #snowmaggedon.” The tweeters were Alicia DeBoer, Romina Cortellucci and Taya Denotter, who announced their retirement this week.

Photo courtesy of The Gazette.

Ontario College of Teachers says teachers should communicate through ‘established education platforms’

An Ontario College of Teachers report advises its members to avoid using social media for personal communication with their students. The College recommends that teachers do not accept Facebook “friend” requests from students, to avoid following them on twitter, texting, or exchanging personal email addresses or other non-work related contact information. According to the Toronto Star, which obtained an early copy of the report, teachers should only use the internet to communicate through “established education platforms” such as a course website. Few school boards in Ontario have guidelines for using social media and the College hopes to establish rules so that professionalism is maintained while permitting social media to be utilized where it would be educationally appropriate.

The Facebook campaign

We take it for granted today that social media is a force to be reckoned with — with students and younger folks leading the charge. It’s really amazing how fast this new reality took hold. I had my stint in student politics from 2003 to 2006 and I never leveraged social networking for that. It all came later. Well, I’m all socially networked now. But I still haven’t tried to use it to make a real point yet. Maybe I haven’t had a truly original point to make until now. Now I think Leonard Cohen should be our next Governor General.

For those who haven’t heard, Stephen Harper recently announced that he would not be recommending Michaelle Jean for a second term as Governor General. Although the Governor General is nominally the Queen’s representative, in actual practice it will be the Prime Minister’s decision as to who is appointed. This decision is effectively one that Mr. Harper can unilaterally make, but all kinds of practical constraints intrude. It has to be someone who won’t embarrass either the nation or Harper’s party. And for all that the Governor General may be very important for a brief time in some constitutional crisis (prorogation anyone?) the odds of this happening again any time soon are so long that it isn’t worth buying a lot of negative press with an unpopular choice. So where does that leave us? This is politics played in the theatre of public opinion. And this is what social media was made for.

So here is Leonard Cohen for Governor General – The Facebook Campaign. And really, why not? He is respected and even revered both internationally and domestically. He is fluently bilingual and is gladly claimed by both French and English Canada. He loves our nation in the quiet way only true Canadians understand. He is spiritual and morally centered without pushing his faith on anyone else. He’s a heck of a good choice in every respect, save perhaps that he’s probably too smart to get suckered into the job. That, and he makes a much better income on stage.

But leaving aside the unlikeliness of the choice, does having a bunch of people in a Facebook group really prove anything? I don’t know. I waffle back and forth on this one. But I do believe in the power of an idea. And social media gives me the power to turn a quip over breakfast into a potentially national movement to draft this man into office. And that’s pretty cool. If enough people join maybe we can actually get his name in the mix. Who knows?

What really matters, more than anything, is that we demonstrate to the government that we are indeed still watching. We care who represents our nation, even in a role that is often just ceremonial. Our choice for Governor General sends a message about who and what we are as a nation. The message I’d like to send to the world is that we’re a nation not afraid to be led by a poet.

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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. You can also follow me on Twitter.

Finally took the “red pill”

After a long period of determined resistance, I finally bought into Twitter. Part of my resistance, for the longest time, was the sense that Twitter would collapse under wide adoption – rather like how the Facebook feed to “watch” what your friends are @doing has effectively collapsed under the weight of too many users and too many friends. It’s been hammered into near uselessness. But the new lists function promises a solution to that for Twitter.

Not to substitute my own new experiences for the informed opinion in that link I just offered, but the advantage of lists is threefold. First, you can maintain public lists to share your interests. That’s fine, but hardly revolutionary. Second, you can follow other lists, and get a sense of what’s going out outside of who you’re following. Again, nice, but not a new idea. But third, you can maintain private lists. This is the game changer for me. This allows you to sort all of the people you are following into topical categories – as broad or as specific as you like. So in my case, for example, I can maintain a list of the folks who write on post-secondary issues and see just what they’ve done lately when I want to get into that topic. It isn’t lost in a sea of where my friends went drinking last night, or details about my cousin’s wedding. And when I do want to see what my family and friends are up to, I can have lists for that too, and sort out everything else.

If anyone is interested, you can follow me here. One complaint about Twitter is that it doesn’t seem to triangulate people very well in the search function, making it hard to find people sometimes. While Facebook will assume the person you want is probably the one you have the most friends in common with, Twitter seems to apply no such logic. So it’s proving hard to find some people. Often, in the new digital age, I do appreciate the advantages of an uncommon name.

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Questions are welcome at jeff.rybak@utoronto.ca. Even the ones I don’t post will still receive answers, and where I do use them here I’ll remove identifying information.