Virtual history: a socially networked pedagogy of enlightenment

In today's online social networking, one can Google social network and stumble upon an array of different results. Each of these choices is often associated with a common cause for people to network. The majority of today's social networks are focused more towards teenagers and young adults as a virtual ldquohangoutrdquo and discussion area. However, there is a lack in one crucial area of social networking development and that is the medical/healthcare industry. One demographic not directly accounted for in the social networking age is people with the need for acquiring medical or healthcare related information and for connecting with others on this level. In addition, Web based social networks are limited to access restrictions. Users are usually required to access from a PC or laptop. This problem is slowly being taken care of with the emergence of mobile social networking. Milestone mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone and the Google/HTC G1 phone have helped jump start this transition. The paper looks into the new aspects how to design a special wireless mobile system (mCare) based on social networking platform in healthcare.

Peer-based prevention programs for homeless youth are complicated by the potential for reinforcing high-risk behaviors among participants. The goal of this study is to understand how homeless youth could be linked to positive peers in prevention programming by understanding where in social and physical space positive peers for homeless youth are located, how these ties are associated with substance use, and the role of social networking technologies (e.g., internet and cell phones) in this process. Personal social network data were collected from 136 homeless adolescents in Los Angeles, CA. Respondents reported on composition of their social networks with respect to: home-based peers and parents (accessed via social networking technology; e.g., the internet, cell phone, texting), homeless peers and agency staff (accessed face-to-face) and whether or not network members were substance-using or non-substance-using. Associations between respondent’s lifetime cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine use and recent (previous 30 days) alcohol and marijuana use were assessed by the number of non-substance-using versus substance-using ties in multivariate linear regression models. 43% of adolescents reported a non-substance-using home-based tie. More of these ties were associated with less recent alcohol use. 62% of adolescents reported a substance-using homeless tie. More of these ties were associated with more recent marijuana use as well as more lifetime heroin and methamphetamine use. For homeless youth, who are physically disconnected from positive peers, social networking technologies can be used to facilitate the sorts of positive social ties that effective peer-based prevention programs require.

Online social networks have been typically created for convenience--so they haven't been built from the ground up with security in mind. They often have confusing privacy settings and are susceptible to various kinds of attacks that exploit users' trust and privacy. In this article, the authors discuss security pitfalls in today's social networks, briefly introducing common attack methods. They implemented a proof-of-concept Facebook app, which is actually a harmless malware that uses common attack methods to demonstrate the vulnerability of online social networks. Although today's online social networks commonly offer users a variety of security settings, users tend to trust the information obtained from online social networks regardless of the settings. This kind of user mentality can be more crucial than technical aspects in determining the level of security in online social networks.

This chapter outlines the social networking tools that are available to individuals working with the legal information community. It encourages readers to think critically about some key issues when using online social networking tools and provides some suggestions for organizational and personal use of these tools. For many professionals social networking has become an important feature of the way they do business. Social networks include everything from project teams to sports teams, communities of practice to focus groups and many more. Online social networking has also become widespread because of the rapid and visible rise of new types of software (such as blogs, wikis, instant messaging, microblogging and bookmarking tools). These tools are more adept at helping people organize themselves, interact, communicate and share knowledge and information. Blogs have been around for about 15 years with the word 'blog' being short for 'web log'. Blogs are effectively online diaries displaying entries in chronological order with the most recent first.

Social networking technology is a new and promising view of IT organization management, allowing for a deeper understanding of the organization’s internal relationships, structure, and social dynamics. This article examines modern approaches and prospects for developing social networking technologies in managing an IT organization based on innovative leadership. The article’s primary purpose is to study modern approaches and prospects for developing social networking technologies as applied tools in IT organization management based on innovative leadership. The article is a theoretical research work that defines the prospects for further research in organizational management. It is expected that the study’s results will reveal the importance of social networks in the context of innovative leadership and justify the effective use of social networking technologies to improve the performance of an IT organization. In addition, identifying the main components that influence the effectiveness of innovation leadership will enable IT organization leaders to effectively implement innovation leadership strategies and contribute to the successful integration of innovations in the organizational environment. The study of this topic is of practical importance. It can be used to develop human resource management strategies and improve the mechanisms for implementing innovations in the organizational environment. Moreover, the research will offer new insights into how social network structures can be optimized to foster a culture of continuous innovation. Given this, the article’s author seeks to consider and study the effectiveness of innovative leadership through the prism of social network theory since she assumes that the structure of the organizational social network can influence its effectiveness.

Social networking sites are profile based websites that allow users to maintain social relationships by viewing, visiting, and sharing their lists of social connections with other members. The use of social networks is a growing phenomenon, being increasingly important in both private and academic life. Social networks are used as tools to enable users to have social interaction. Social networking tools, reinforced by proliferation and advances in portable computing and wireless technologies have reshaped how information is produced, communicated, and consumed. Social networking tools also play the important role in research activities. Research is a systematic inquiry that investigates hypotheses, suggests new interpretations of data or texts, and poses new questions for future research to explore. Nowadays, research has been increased in all disciplines and the role of research in academic institutions is become more important. In recent, Influence of information technology the trends in research have been changed and this paper highlights the social networking research tools and its importance for systematic and quality research.

This study explored the impact of high‐immersion virtual reality (VR) as an innovative andragogical tool in undergraduate biology education. Amidst concerns about traditional lecture‐based teaching methods, VR can offer interactive hands‐on experiences. The study hypothesized that students who opt in for a supplementary VR experience will outperform the students presented with text‐based lectures and the students presented with video‐assisted content in content‐related quizzes and assignments. The study involved 456 students of an undergraduate contemporary biology course. Three conditions were presented over four semesters: a VR activity focused on teaching genetics and Punnett squares that supplemented a video lecture, video lecture only and long‐form text‐based materials only. Pre‐ and post‐VR activity tests were conducted to assess knowledge gains and perceptions of the VR experience of the 49 students who chose the additional VR experience. Results suggest significant improvements in the immediate content‐related post‐test scores, delivered in multiple‐choice format. A significant difference was observed in the mean scores of the genetics module assignments (delivered in long‐form text format) among the three groups (ie, VR‐and‐video‐assisted group; video‐assisted group; text‐only materials group). The text‐only group scored the lowest, while the video‐and‐VR‐assisted group scored the highest, but only marginally higher than the video‐assisted group. The results suggest that VR provides a viable, scalable and cost‐effective complement to traditional laboratory practice. Rather than outperforming lecture‐based approaches, VR offers an accessible way to practical experiences that would otherwise require specialized facilities or costly equipment. Our findings provide a baseline and highlight a need for further research to investigate the full potential and limitations of integrating VR in biology education. Practitioner notes What is already known about this topic Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as an increasingly viable method of engaging users in educational experiences. VR as a medium can engage users in ways traditional media struggle to achieve, such as fostering empathy and delivering immersive experiences. Hands‐on learning opportunities remain highly relevant to STEM education, an area highly appropriate for exploration in VR. VR has gained considerable traction in biology education. What this paper adds Evidence for the integration of VR into a high‐enrollment, accredited curriculum implemented in a naturalistic, ecologically valid context. A comparison of VR‐assisted biology lessons with more traditional, video‐ or text‐based lecture in high‐enrollment undergraduate courses. VR experiences may be more beneficial than lecture‐based instruction for complex topics in undergraduate education. Implications for practice and/or policy VR is particularly useful in addressing typically challenging learning concepts. The integration of VR technology with large‐enrollment undergraduate courses is possible. The availability of VR experiences and equipment remains necessary for the successful integration of VR.

Lengthy early morning instant messages reveal more than you think: Analysing interpersonal relationships using mobile communication metadata

Susan Dalton. Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2003). Pp. 206 + ix. $70.00 cloth. Alessa Johns. Women's Utopias of the Eighteenth Century (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003). Pp. 212 + xi. $34.95 cloth. Patricia Meyer Spacks. Privacy: Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Pp. 242 + vii. $36.00 cloth. A critical rethinking of the ubiquitous terms "public" and "private" in the eighteenth-century context informs the three books under review here. Susan Dalton, Alessa Johns, and Patricia Meyer Spacks explicitly address the influence of Habermas' 1962 Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit (translated, in 1989, as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society) on the entire field of eighteenth-century studies. In their nuanced readings of eighteenth-century literary and cultural production, Dalton, Johns, and Spacks question the prevalent interpretation of Habermas as establishing a strict binary opposition between the public and the private and, perhaps even more importantly, an equation of the private with the domestic and the public with the political. While Habermas has coined these terms and injected them into the critical discourse about the eighteenth century, the strict demarcation of supposedly separate spheres is more a product of Strukturwandel's subsequent reception than of Habermas' theory itself, prompted by critics' desire to establish some kind of coherent categorization for the complex nature of eighteenth-century life and letters. Habermas himself discusses the intersections of the public and private spheres and explores the arising ambivalences. He argues that the opposition between the "intimate sphere of the conjugal family" (51) and the "public sphere" was, above all, a discursive construct because the intimate/domestic sphere formed part of the private sphere of the gradually developing market economy. Even though the domestic was imagined as unaffected by the workings of the private realm of the market economy due to the accelerating division of labor and family life in the eighteenth century, both were connected not only to each other, but also to what Habermas calls the "public sphere in the world of letters" and "the public sphere in the political realm" (51). While the ideological construction of these separate spheres affected reality to some extent and women became increasingly equated with the domestic in the discourse of the time, an analysis of this reality also shows how porous and connected these areas were. Habermas' discussion of these intersections serves as the starting point for the studies of eighteenth-century literature and culture by Dalton, Johns, and Spacks. They explore the space which Habermas himself highlights but which has often been overlooked: the third space where public and private aspects meet in complex and ambivalent ways. The authors' well-reasoned and compelling analyses of these intersections [End Page 394] in British, French, German, and Italian writings underline the complexity of eighteenth-century textual production by men and women. In Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres in Eighteenth-Century Europe, Susan Dalton looks with a historian's eye at the correspondence of four French and Italian salon women, Julie de Lespinasse, Marie-Jeanne Roland, Giustina Renier Michiel, and Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini. Dalton explores the communities formed by social networking and polite sociability in the eighteenth-century republic of letters and investigates salon women's engagement with the political and philosophical debates of their time. Her argument perceptively unravels the ambivalence that characterizes these elite women's theoretical writings and their practical applications. Yet, rather than classifying these ambivalent moments as contradictions, Dalton disentangles these women's strategic negotiation of gender discourses. This mediation allowed them to express their political views at the same time that it enabled them to echo discourses of propriety and...

The results of the research are presented in six main parts, as follows: “Information space and new patterns of data and information organization”, “Information strategies, social networks and influence in cyberspace”, “Hybrid conflicts and new instruments of power in cyberspace”, “New instruments of power: hybrid threats and hybrid operations”, “Hybrid operations in hybrid conflicts and hybrid warfare” and “New patterns of prevention and defence against hybrid threats”. In the first part, social networks are considered as powerful and effective means of communication and media for global, mass, networked, direct and anonymous communication, which are used in cyberspace to effectively impose ideas, ideologies and create and spread disinformation. The second part describes the adjustment of information strategies and information operations, and describes new patterns of planning, implementation and operation of psychological and media operations in which various actors (state, non-state and corporate) use artificial intelligence technologies on social networks for their own needs and interests. The third part of the dissertation presents the causes and occurrence of hybrid conflicts, their definitions and main features. Then, hybrid threats and hybrid operations of influence are presented, as new instruments of power in cyberspace that have emerged as a result of cyberspace misuse and artificial intelligence technologies on social networks. In this part of the research, we observe social networks as means of planning and conducting hybrid influence operations, which we consider here as the main information instrument of hybrid power, that achieves the strongest effects through cyberspace and serves to create strong and effective disinformation and other types of hybrid threats. The fifth part of the dissertation presents the results of research related to a representative sample of known and recognized examples of misuse of artificial intelligence technologies on social networks for planning and conducting hybrid impact operations. The primary scope of research relates to the hybrid influence operations carried out by the United States and the Russian Federation in different geographical areas and in different contexts. The sixth part of the dissertation proposes new patterns of prevention and defence against hybrid threats and operations, the creation of a new information strategy, and defence mechanisms and models. The end of this section points out the importance and the role of building digital and data sovereignty. The research confirmed the main hypothesis. Artificial intelligence and social networking technologies in hybrid conflicts are used as powerful and efficient tactical tools, with potential strategic consequences for the body of public knowledge of target audiences, in order to (re)shape it according to the needs of the information attacker. We have demonstrated that these are psychological operations of a strategic nature, in which artificial intelligence technologies and all social networks are used as dominant and effective tactical means, in a spatially and temporally unlimited range, to create disinformation and other various types of hybrid threats and constant (24/7) informationpsychological pressures directed at target audiences (individually, in groups or en masse) depending on the needs and goals of the information attacker.

This talk addresses an issues, deeply felt in next generation networks, concerning the management of group communications in scenarios characterized by the massive presence of Internet of Things devices acting as “prosumers” (consumer&producer) of services based on the exchange of huge data amounts. This will put a strain on existing networking primitives and their efficient management will be possible only if new paradigms are made available. Starting from this assumption, the talk will discuss the possibility of leveraging Social Networking and Software Defined Networking technologies and concepts towards the definition of a novel network primitive for the Internet of Things. The new primitive, called Sociocast, has the potential to enable trusted group-oriented communications, in-network publish&subscribe mechanisms, dynamic and selective firewalling, flexible data casting. During the talk a distributed architectural solution is presented, some performance results shown, and open research issues discussed.

Recent uprisings in the Arab world consist of individuals revealing vastly different preferences than were expressed prior to the uprisings. This paper sheds light on the general mechanisms underlying large-scale social and institutional change. We employ an agent-based model to test the impact of authority centralization and social network technology on preference revelation and falsification, social protest, and institutional change. We find that the amount of social and institutional change is decreasing with authority centralization in simulations with low network range but is increasing with authority centralization in simulations with greater network range. The relationship between institutional change and social shocks is not linear, but rather is characterized by sharp discontinuities. The threshold at which a shock can “tip” a system towards institutional change is decreasing with the geographic reach of citizen social networks. Farther reaching social networks reduce the robustness and resilience of central authorities to change. This helps explain why highly centralized regimes frequently attempt to restrict information flows via the media and Internet. More generally, our results highlight the role that information and communication technology can play in triggering cascades of preference revelation and revolutionary activity in varying institutional regimes.

My doctoral research is an exploratory project focused on understanding and theorizing on the ways in which various social networking technologies (SNTs) facilitate informal knowledge sharing in the workplace. Forms of SNT include (but are not limited to) corporate social networking platforms, weblogs, wikis, and social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. Here I discuss the work to date, outline future steps and detail the expected contributions of this research. The primary outcome of this research is a greater conceptualization of the role and value of various SNTs for knowledge sharing in organizational contexts, which still remain understudied within the CSCW arena.

National Institute of Mental Health.

The article is dedicated to one of the most relevant issues of contemporary philosophy: methodology for analysis of social space and social time. It considers the cognitive foundations of perception of space, some aspects of the design process of spatial models and their reflection in a natural language. Understanding of space is impossible without linguistic constructions, as many peculiarities of environment including spatial and ontological facts can be formed and fixed in human consciousness through linguistic concepts. Two dominant structures of social objective reality - i.e. social time and space - have been discussed: processes of genesis of informational society and world globalization. It is revealed that usage of category of “identity” gives principally new opportunities to reflect specificity of social space and time under globalization. The article considers social networks as a principally new form of social space in information society: they are deprived of constant localization and calendar determinants, abide by their internal laws and are not vulnerable to unification processes. It is also shown that in the general context of world globalization the character of mutual determination of social time and space is changing. Not so long ago the main tendency of social time and space was seen in accelerating its “going”. Nowadays, under contemporary hyperdynamic globalization of social objective reality the objective measure of social time is power of substance streams in social space, energy, and information, and this power is mediated by new forms of social objective reality, including global market, international corporations, electronic stock exchange and money, Internet etc.