FIRST! If you haven't tried Study Blue yet, you should! Facebook has been advertising it on the side of my page for months now and I finally broke down and gave it a try. Just in time for finals week! It's a website that lets you make flashcard and save you class notes so you can access them from anywhere (including on your phone!). You can make it private it or share it. I'm using it right now for my biopsychology final and it shows me that one of my classmates is using the website as well AND sharing her class notes. I used my school email so it immediately knew the university and I just put in my class title and bam! It found her. I'm not really sure how or where she's getting some of her material like practice test but I haven't looked at them. She includes study material Stolloff has provided so I'm not sure what the rules are there but.....Anyway! It's great! I love being able to look at my flashcards on the go when I have like 10 minutes before a class or 5 minutes awkwardly waiting for a friend to show up for lunch on campus. Also, it's easier than keeping up with paper flashcards...I know I've dropped more than a few around the halls of miller. I have horrible handwriting so typing flashcards is way easier for me to read. Oh and it happens to be free! Hope you guys enjoy it! Just thought I'd share my experience with this.
Research Proposal. My topic is Facebook usage and how your life changes once you stop. I'll be honest, I'm still working out some major kinks. I started out with a HUGE hypothesis that was really all over the place so I had to narrow it down to this:
College students with high Facebook usage will see an increase in the quantity of their face-to-face social interactions after deactivating their profile for 30 days.
High usage is defined as checking the site more than 4 times a day or staying on for over 3 hours. Originally I was going to do quality of face-to-face interactions but that's hard to judge. I also considered general life satisfaction but....I dunno, what do you guys think? When I made the graphs for those results it just seems so...plain. My idea was to see if people felt closer to their friends and happier without Facebook. Or miserable. I keep going back and forth with this paper so any feedback is welcome, even if you think this is a horrible topic!
And to close, I'd like to throw in a little shameless self-promoting. I was so inspired by all of my classmates' blogging experiences and Rachel's description of 365 Project that I'm going to start picture blogging! But not until New Years day. BUT! If you want to follow it (which I think would be cool) I think this is the link. Be sure to check it out January 1st!
Woo! Okay! 1st...I love the studyblue thing! Definitely going to check it out and hopefully it will make studying for finals a lot easier!
ReplyDelete2nd...I'm totally going to pose you and do the 365 project too! I think its the perfect new year's resolution and it'll be so fun! I can always take a picture of my pet if it's a lame day AND with new things next year like going away to grad school....it should be fun for my friends and family to look at! (I'm already following you...and my address is http://365project.org/ayerskv/365)
About your research proposal...I like the idea! I also like your definition of high usage. It's always good to have a solid definition in mind.
How are you planning to measure the quantity of face-to-face social interactions? Will they take note of each interaction before and after the deactivation? Also, I feel like without facebook, people may resort to using other non-ftf modes of communication more frequently (such as texting) so maybe doing quantity of interactions would be complicated. Does that make sense?
I kind of like the idea of general life satisfaction. I feel like it'd be really easy to do. Just a pre-measure, delete facebook, maybe a middle measure at 15 days, and then a post-measure at 30 days. It's possible that having more free time (because of not being on facebook) and interacting more with people through other ways could lead to increased life satisfaction.
I don't know...hopefully that helped a little bit? Seems kind of rambly but I tried...
Very interesting, Ashley! I made a StudyBlue profile just to see what it's like. Looks like only one student from my Psyc 395 class is on there...and I can't tell what, if anything, is posted. Just a word of advice - if you are planning on posting things for others to have access to (like materials Dr. Stoloff gave you or materials you got from somewhere else), I recommend talking with Dr. Stoloff about it to let him know. There was a recent huge cheating scandal at Univ of Central Florida where a bunch of students got access to a test bank and shared it among themselves. It's unclear whether the students knew whether they were doing something wrong or not, but a lot of people got into a lot of trouble. So - word to the wise - check before you post/share materials. If it's something you created (like your flashcards or review questions for studying) it shouldn't be a problem, but other things might be a problem.
ReplyDeleteAs far as using social networking for studying, take a look at this article:
http://chronicle.com/article/New-Social-Software-Tries-to/125542/
It talks about several "Facebook-like" sites set up specifically for group studying, etc.
And I think it's so cool you guys are going to try the 365 project! You're inspiring me. I might have to try it.
I haven't tried study blue yet, but I have heard so many good things about it! Hopefully I will try it soon! I need some good study habits! However, Dr. Baker brings up a good point. Putting up something without permission can often be risky. Even if you make it private, is it really private?
ReplyDeleteAnd about your hypothesis I like it. It seems like this would be an article I'd actually read in my free-time!
Also, special thanks to Kayla, Brittany (and Leah), and Ashley for coming all the way out to my party on Friday! Hope you all had as much fun as I did!!