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The use of social media by Polish and Slovak students and their digital competences
Abstract
In this study, the main goal is to indicate the differences between the use of SM by Polish and Slovak students and the relationship between the use of SM and digital competences. A questionnaire survey conducted among Polish and Slovak students of technical faculties was used to obtain the data. The analysis was performed using the methods of multivariate statistical analysis. The study was conducted in October-December 2018 in parallel in Poland and Slovakia. In the course of the study, 172 questionnaires were returned from students from Poland and 171 from students from Slovakia, representing a manoeuvrability of 49% and 65% respectively. The main finding of the research on the use of SM is the more frequent use of SM by Slovak students. The results showed that Twitter and Instagram (after Facebook, which was used by over 98% of respondents ) are more often (significantly) used by Slovak students, and YouTube and WhatsApp by Polish students. Our results also show that information competences demonstrate much less correlation with the use of social media compared to IT competences. The presented research results aim to fill the gap focusing on finding a relationship between the use of SM and digital competences. This approach results primarily from the universal use of SM and the need to develop competences that are the basis for effective functioning in the professional and private sphere in the era of digitization.
... Furthermore, due to the properties of the scale, the Whitney U-Mann test was used in comparative analyses. The U-Mann-Whitney test is a kind of equivalent to the test of means for weaker scales (Smoląg, Szajt i Hajduová., 2023 ). Calculations were made using Statistica software. ...
Objectives
The article focuses on the analysis and evaluation of changes in tenant behavior and expecta-tions, in the rental market during constraints on the operation of, among others, institutions, businesses, and schools, during the pandemic. The behavior of young people, who, by defini-tion, base their housing needs more heavily on rent, was analyzed. The purpose of the article is to analyze the factors that affect the use of rent by young people in the Lower Silesian province during the pandemic. This research paper attempted to answer in what direction these changes have gone. In the process of designing the study, research hypotheses were formulated. Based on statistical analysis, it was assumed that the key factor that affects long-term rent use is lack of creditworthiness
Material and methods
The survey conducted focused on young people. An author's survey questionnaire was used. The questionnaire titled Rental Market Preferences addressed to tenants using rental housing in the Lower Silesian province during the study contained nine closed questions. This article focuses on the evaluation of the behavior of young people on the housing market during the pandemic period.
Results
The methodology used allowed us to verify the relationship between the number of rooms rented and the rental risk factors, thus confirming the validity of the research hypothesis.
Conclusions
Factors influencing long-term rental use include changes in personal circumstances and lack of creditworthiness. During the pandemic period, the number of divorces in Poland increased from 13.4 per 10,000 people in 2020 to 15.9 in 2022. The research was carried out in the cities of the Lower Silesian province, which is mainly populated by young people living away from the family home, unable to nest with their parents after the breakup of a relationship.
Social media usage is known to harness new lifestyle among the youth. Use of social media promotes the negative as well as positive consequences for the students in general and academic life. This study examined the relationship between social media usage, multitasking of social media, and students' academic self-efficacy on students' academic performance among Malaysian youth. The current work also evaluates the mediating effect of students' academic self-efficacy on social media usage and social media multitasking on their academic performance. This study embraced a cross-sectional research design and quantitative data collected from 644 Malaysian students of higher education institutions. The collected data were analysed using SPSS v23 and PLS-SEM-based SmartPLS 3.1. The findings revealed that social media usage and social media multitasking are positively and significantly related to students' self-efficacy. Moreover, the results also showed that social media usage and multitasking, and students' self-efficacy are significantly associated with their academic performance. The results also exposed the mediational effect of students' self-efficacy on the relationship between social media multitasking and students' academic performance in higher education. The study recommends that by initiating the self-efficacy program in promoting social media's academic use and multitasking among Malaysian higher education students would result in better performance. Keywords: Social Media, self-efficacy, multitasking, media usage, academic performance.
Technologies are increasingly being used in society and the economy, and this is transforming ways of working, studying, communicating, accessing information and spending leisure time, among others. Attention must be paid to ensuring that everyone has digital competence as it provides important benefits while its lack can lead to various risks to children, young people, workers, elderly, groups at risk of exclusion and all citizens in general. It is not always clear however what is meant with digital competence. Therefore, the IS Unit at JRC-IPTS has launched a project to develop guidelines for supporting digital competence development in Europe on the request of DG Education and Culture.
This report reviews needs for digital competence, different concepts used to describe and understand it, and related policy approaches and measurements. Based on these, it suggests a conceptual model with the following main areas: 1) Instrumental knowledge and skills for tool and media usage; 2) Advanced skills and knowledge for communication and collaboration, information management, learning and problem-solving, and meaningful participation; 3) Attitudes to strategic skills usage in intercultural, critical, creative, responsible and autonomous ways. Instrumental knowledge and skills are a precondition for developing or using more advanced skills. The objective of the conceptual model is to highlight the various knowledge, skill and attitude areas that should be considered when developing digital competence. The proposed structure allows flexibility and the concept to be tailored to different target groups of digital competence learners and users.
The work developed in this report will contribute to the IPTS DIGCOMP project, where it will also be developed further. The reader is encouraged to follow the project’s progress and results at the project website: http://is.jrc.ec.europa.eu/pages/EAP/DIGCOMP.html
This study brings attention to the determinants of 21st-century skills and 21st-century digital skills. The following skills are investigated: technical, information, communication, collaboration, critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving skills. To understand differences in the level of these skills among workers, we need to know the factors that determine an individual’s skill level. A systematic literature review was conducted to provide a comprehensive overview of empirical studies measuring skill determinants. The results show that there is strong need for research on determinants of communication and collaboration skills. In a digital context, determinants for creativity and critical thinking are hardly studied. Furthermore, the identified determinants of 21st-century skills studies are limited to personality and psychological determinants, neglecting, for example, social determinants such as social support. Although digital skills studies show more variety, they mostly cover demographic and socioeconomic determinants.
This article aims to analyze the influence of professional training on the digital competence of tourism students at a Mexican public university. For this, a quantitative methodology was used through the application of a survey amongst 400 students. Moreover, the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and other multivariate techniques were used to test the hypotheses. The results show that the role of teaching, the curriculum proposal, and the student autonomy as part of professional training all have an impact on digital competence in order to generate and effectively use digital knowledge, manage information in support of their activities and use the media in individual and collective channels, as well as emancipate collaborative learning and maintain leadership in the network. It is discussed how the emphasis of curricular programs and the support of teachers play a significant role as cultivators of digital competence, as well as the initiative and independence of students to better exploit digital media for their personal, academic and professional activities.
In order to develop 21st-century skills, especially with respect to digital technologies, students are supposed to know how to use digital technologies for learning and problem solving. In recent years, approaches to personalized learning have been considered to be particularly promising in this regard. A clearly defined concept of personalized learning is still lacking, however. Rather, it serves an umbrella term for educational approaches that try to do justice to the individual abilities, knowledge and learning needs of each student. Our study deals with theoretical dimensions of this multilayered concept and investigates the in-school use of digital technologies for personalized learning as reported by students in connection with their self-assessed digital skills and beliefs about the usefulness of ICT in learning. For this purpose, we have analyzed data from a survey of N = 860 students (8th grade) from 31 Swiss schools that have introduced personalized learning concepts. A structural equation model shows that increased reported use of digital technologies in learning environments that are characterized by open teaching methods is an important aspect of personalized learning because it has a positive effect on both self-reported digital skills and self-perceived ICT-related beliefs in learning. At the same time, the experienced freedom of choice in learning activities that include digital technologies, which is often considered a crucial dimension of personalized learning, has no significant effect.
This study investigates how the use of Twitter and Facebook affects citizens’ knowledge acquisition, and whether this effect is conditional upon people’s political interest. Using a panel survey design with repeated measures of knowledge acquisition, this study is able to disentangle causality and to demonstrate that more frequent usage of Twitter positively affects the acquisition of current affairs knowledge. The opposite is found for Facebook: More frequent Facebook usage causes a decline in knowledge acquisition. This negative effect of Facebook usage occurred particularly for citizens with less political interest, thereby, amplifying the existing knowledge gap between politically interested and uninterested citizens.
Although increasing numbers of employees working in public organizations are using social media for work purposes and numerous studies exist on how social media affect organizational outcomes, we have very limited knowledge of how using social media for work purposes affects employees' work motivation. This paper fills this important gap by using self-determination theory (SDT) to analyze how the use of social media for work purposes is associated with government employees' need satisfaction and intrinsic work motivation. According to regression results, employees' use of social media is positively related to employees' need satisfaction (autonomy, relatedness, and competence) and, accordingly, intrinsic work motivation. However, further analysis shows that too much use of social media has an averse effect. Theoretically, this study is one of the pioneer attempts to integrate e-governance with SDT. Practically, we encourage managers to use caution in promoting the use of social media for work purposes. Using social media two to three days a week may be the ideal range.
For a long time, a common opinion among policy-makers was that the digital divide problem would be solved when a country’s Internet connection rate reaches saturation. However, scholars of the second-level digital divide have concluded that the divides in Internet skills and type of use continue to expand even after physical access is universal. This study—based on an online survey among a representative sample of the Dutch population—indicates that the first-level digital divide remains a problem in one of the richest and most technologically advanced countries in the world. By extending basic physical access combined with material access, the study finds that a diversity in access to devices and peripherals, device-related opportunities, and the ongoing expenses required to maintain the hardware, software, and subscriptions affect existing inequalities related to Internet skills, uses, and outcomes.
Teachers need to be prepared to use ICT and provide technology-supported learning opportunities for their students. The set of knowledge and skills needed for these activities has also been called teachers’ digital competence. Despite the importance of this competence, different studies show that student-teachers do not always achieve an appropriate level during their training period, and it is necessary to rethink the training programs to improve the development of student-teachers’ digital competence.
Several advanced technological environments (such as LMS) have appeared that are especially suited to the development and evaluation of competences. However, outside of these closed and controlled environments, the Internet provides platforms like social networks with a range of possibilities more in line with current trends and professional skills. Social media might promote potentially richer opportunities to make learning more personally meaningful, collaborative, and socially relevant.
The main objectives of this DBR project are to: (1) Design a technological tool to integrate the activity of social networks with the institutional LMS; (2) Develop educational activities with social media for developing student-teachers’ digital competence; and (3) Evaluate the student-teachers’ digital competence.
Recent studies show that students’ digital competence is part of a process of academic literacy that requires the development of information and ICT literacies. This article attempts to analyse digital competence and the development of information and ICT literacies in relation to academic literacy practices which take place in the learning process in undergraduate studies. Data were collected through completion of self-report questionnaires asking about the writing and reading practices and the process of literacy development in university students. The survey was completed by a sample of 786 students in the School of Education. The data obtained were analysed using the techniques of principal components analysis and discriminant analysis. The results describe the ICT and information literacies in literacy practices of the participants, and their relation to the academic literacy process that takes place at university. The results have allowed us to assess the processes for the development of ICT and information literacies and their relationship to academic literacy. Our study indicates a wide gap between digital competence developed in informal learning contexts and its scarcity in university literacy practices (formal learning settings). In general, Spanish University academic practices do not incorporate ICT and information literacies processes as a part of students' academic literacy. Deficient ICT and informational literacies may lead to difficulties in the professional development of teachers.
The sciences are often perceived by students as irrelevant as they do not see the content of science as related to their daily lives. Web 2.0-mediated activities are characterized by user-driven content production, collaboration, and multi-way communication. It has been proposed that employing Web 2.0 in educational activities will promote richer opportunities for making learning personally meaningful, collaborative, and socially relevant. Since Facebook is already in use among youths, it potentially provides a communicative link between educational content and students’ lives. The present study was conducted as a case study to provide an inductive, explorative investigation of whether and how the integration of Facebook into upper secondary biology can affect interest in biology and participation in learning communication. The results indicate that the coupling of formal and informal communication practices on Facebook serves to maintain interest and open up new learning possibilities while at the same time creating barriers to communication. These barriers are due to distractions, ethical issues, and a certain depreciation of the activities ensuing from the everydayness of Facebook as a communication platform. In conclusion, use of Facebook as an educational platform is not clearly good or bad.
Ever since the emergence of social networking sites (SNSs), it has remained a question without a conclusive answer whether SNSs make people more or less lonely. To achieve a better understanding, researchers need to move beyond studying overall SNS usage. In addition, it is necessary to attend to personal attributes as potential moderators. Given that SNSs provide rich opportunities for social comparison, one highly relevant personality trait would be social comparison orientation (SCO), and yet this personal attribute has been understudied in social media research. Drawing on literature of psychosocial implications of social media use and SCO, this study explored associations between loneliness and various Instagram activities and the role of SCO in this context. A total of 208 undergraduate students attending a U.S. mid-southern university completed a self-report survey (Mage = 19.43, SD = 1.35; 78 percent female; 57 percent White). Findings showed that Instagram interaction and Instagram browsing were both related to lower loneliness, whereas Instagram broadcasting was associated with higher loneliness. SCO moderated the relationship between Instagram use and loneliness such that Instagram interaction was related to lower loneliness only for low SCO users. The results revealed implications for healthy SNS use and the importance of including personality traits and specific SNS use patterns to disentangle the role of SNS use in psychological well-being.
We focus on the digital competence as one of the eight key competences defined by the European Commission (2006). This competence can be broadly defined as the confident, critical and creative use of ICT to achieve goals related to work, employability, learning, leisure, inclusion and/or participation in society (Ferrari, 2013). The purpose of our study is to know the perceptions of teacher students about their digital competences to develop their future profession. In this work, we present the design and the direction of our research in order to reflect and move forward in it.
A major change has recently been occurred in the use of the Internet technology and this rapid change resulted in emerging Web 2.0 technologies which refers to wikis, blogs, social networking, social bookmarking, instant messaging, Internet telephony, and audio/video conferencing. Many students started to use some aspects of Web 2.0 technologies in today's digital environment and they have gained competency in these areas whereas some are still having difficulties in even using the computer. In this changing world, it is a necessity to investigate their perceptions towards Web 2.0 technologies because it is believed that it affects the improvement of learning and interaction among learners and teachers (Hartshorne & Ajjan, 2009). As a result, this study intends to examine the perceptions of the teacher candidates in the Department of Educational Sciences at Eastern Mediterranean University.
Digital literacy involves more than the mere ability to use software or operate a digital device; it includes a large vari- ety of complex cognitive, motor, sociological, and emotional skills, which users need in order to function effectively in digital environments. The tasks required in this context in- clude, for example, "reading" instructions from graphical displays in user interfaces; using digital reproduction to cre- ate new, meaningful materials from existing ones; construct- ing knowledge from a nonlinear, hypertextual navigation; evaluating the quality and validity of information; and have a mature and realistic understanding of the "rules" that prevail in the cyberspace. This newly emerging concept of digital literacy may be used as a measure of the quality of learners' work in digital environments, and provide scholars and de- velopers with a more effective means of communication in designing better user-oriented environments. This article pro- poses a holistic, refined conceptual framework for digital lit- eracy, which includes photo-visual literacy; reproduction lit- eracy; branching literacy; information literacy; and socio- emotional literacy.
This article expands understanding of the digital divide to more nuanced measures of use by examining differences in young adults' online activities. Young adults are the most highly connected age group, but that does not mean that their Internet uses are homogenous. Analyzing data about the Web uses of 270 adults from across the United States, the article explores the differences in 18- to 26-year-olds' online activities and what social factors explain the variation. Findings suggest that those with higher levels of education and of a more resource-rich background use the Web for more “capitalenhancing” activities. Detailed analyses of user attributes also reveal that online skill is an important mediating factor in the types of activities people pursue online. The authors discuss the implications of these findings for a “second-level digital divide,” that is, differences among the population of young adult Internet users.
Despite the widespread use of social media by students and its increased use by instructors, very little empirical evidence is available concerning the impact of social media use on student learning and engagement. This paper describes our semester-long experimental study to determine if using Twitter – the microblogging and social networking platform most amenable to ongoing, public dialogue – for educationally relevant purposes can impact college student engagement and grades. A total of 125 students taking a first year seminar course for pre-health professional majors participated in this study (70 in the experimental group and 55 in the control group). With the experimental group, Twitter was used for various types of academic and co-curricular discussions. Engagement was quantified by using a 19-item scale based on the National Survey of Student Engagement. To assess differences in engagement and grades, we used mixed effects analysis of variance (ANOVA) models, with class sections nested within treatment groups. We also conducted content analyses of samples of Twitter exchanges. The ANOVA results showed that the experimental group had a significantly greater increase in engagement than the control group, as well as higher semester grade point averages. Analyses of Twitter communications showed that students and faculty were both highly engaged in the learning process in ways that transcended traditional classroom activities. This study provides experimental evidence that Twitter can be used as an educational tool to help engage students and to mobilize faculty into a more active and participatory role.
In the increasingly user-generated Web, users’ personality traits may be crucial factors leading them to engage in this participatory media. The literature suggests factors such as extraversion, emotional stability and openness to experience are related to uses of social applications on the Internet. Using a national sample of US adults, this study investigated the relationship between these three dimensions of the Big-Five model and social media use (defined as use of social networking sites and instant messages). It also examined whether gender and age played a role in that dynamic. Results revealed that while extraversion and openness to experiences were positively related to social media use, emotional stability was a negative predictor, controlling for socio-demographics and life satisfaction. These findings differed by gender and age. While extraverted men and women were both likely to be more frequent users of social media tools, only the men with greater degrees of emotional instability were more regular users. The relationship between extraversion and social media use was particularly important among the young adult cohort. Conversely, being open to new experiences emerged as an important personality predictor of social media use for the more mature segment of the sample.
The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the term “Social Media” exactly means; this article intends to provide some clarification. We begin by describing the concept of Social Media, and discuss how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Based on this definition, we then provide a classification of Social Media which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Finally, we present 10 pieces of advice for companies which decide to utilize Social Media.
With the advancement of technology, social media use increases day by day, especially among university students. This descriptive and correlational research was conducted with the aim of investigating attitudes of nursing and midwifery students towards social media in terms of certain variables. The population of the research comprised students studying at the nursing and midwifery department of a health college (N = 336), and the sample of the research constituted students who were chosen using accidental sampling from the population (n = 254). A Student Information Form and the Social Media Attitude Scale were used for data collection. It was identified that 73% of the students studied nursing and 64.2% used social media for various reasons. The averages scores for total score, social competence, need for sharing, relationship with the teachers, and social isolation dimensions of Social Media Attitude Scale were found as 72.19 ± 10.92 (23–115), 14.17 ± 4.87 (6–30), 27.65 ± 6.08 (8–40), 7.50 ± 3.20 (3–15), and 13.14 ± 5.01 (6–30), respectively. It was observed that nursing and midwifery students had positive attitudes towards social media. Furthermore, although the personal characteristics of students do not affect their attitudes towards social media, the features of social media have a statistically significant effect on students attitudes towards social media.
Trip purpose is crucial to travel behavior modeling and travel demand estimation for transportation planning and investment decisions. However, the spatial-temporal complexity of human activities makes the prediction of trip purpose a challenging problem. This research, an extension of work by Ermagun et al. (2017) and Meng et al. (2017), addresses the problem of predicting both current and next trip purposes with both Google Places and social media data. First, this paper implements a new approach to match points of interest (POIs) from the Google Places API with historical Twitter data. Therefore, the popularity of each POI can be obtained. Additionally, a Bayesian neural network (BNN) is employed to model the trip dependence on each individual’s daily trip chain and infer the trip purpose. Compared with traditional models, it is found that Google Places and Twitter information can greatly improve the overall accuracy of prediction for certain activities, including “EatOut”, “Personal”, “Recreation” and “Shopping”, but not for “Education” and “Transportation”. In addition, trip duration is found to be an important factor in inferring activity/trip purposes. Further, to address the computational challenge in the BNN, an elastic net is implemented for feature selection before the classification task. Our research can lead to three types of possible applications: activity-based travel demand modeling, survey labeling assistance, and online recommendations.
This research examines the extent to which immigrant consumers' use of social networking sites affect their
socialization and political engagement in the Netherlands. The study uses self-administered questionnaires to
collect data from 514 Turkish-Dutch respondents of various ages, occupations, levels of education and locations
in the Netherlands. The study finds that the propensity to share information, the intensity of use, and privacy
concerns positively impact socialization on online social networking sites. In addition, a significant positive
relationship between socialization and political involvement positively impacts voting intentions. The study also
examines the interaction effects of enculturation and acculturation orientations on the relationship between
socialization and political involvement. The study's findings point to a positive moderating role of acculturation
in this relationship but a negative one for enculturation. The study is the first to investigate simultaneously the
drivers of socialization on social networking sites in the context of immigrant consumers and the impact of their
socialization on political involvement and voting intention. The research further contributes to the scholarly
work by exploring the interaction effects of acculturation and enculturation orientation. Theoretical and practical
implications are discussed.
Research and practice have mostly focused on the "bright side" of social media, aiming to understand and help in leveraging the manifold opportunities afforded by this technology. However, it is increasingly observable that social media present enormous risks for individuals, communities, firms, and even for society as a whole. Examples for this "dark side" of social media include cyberbullying, addictive use, trolling, online witch hunts, fake news, and privacy abuse. In this article, we aim to illustrate the multidimensionality of the dark side of social media and describe the related various undesirable outcomes. To do this, we adapt the established social media honeycomb framework to explain the dark side implications of each of the seven functional building blocks: conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation, groups, and identity. On the basis of these reflections, we present a number of avenues for future research, so as to facilitate a better understanding and use of social media.
The widespread belief is that youth, “digital natives” who live their entire lives in media-rich digital environments and are ubiquitously connected through social networks, naturally develop digital competencies. This study investigated digital literacies among 280 junior-high-school students with the aim of comparing participants’ perceived digital literacy competencies and their actual performance in relevant digital tasks. The findings showed that only a few of participants’ perceived skills were related to their actual performance. Generally, participants displayed high confidence in their digital literacies and significantly over-estimated their actual competencies. This gap was most evident in social-emotional skills, which were, on average, perceived by students as their strongest skills, while their actual level of performance was very low. Positive strong correlations were found between participants’ self-reported evaluations of different digital skills, indicating their perception as a single factor, while actual performance tests revealed low-to medium-size correlations between different literacies. For educational decision-makers, the findings highlight the importance of designing training programs aimed to develop students’ digital literacies, with a special emphasis on social-emotional competencies. Such training may enhance important competencies needed, reduce unfounded self-perceptions, and thus, develop efficient digital functioning in contemporary society.
Background
Social media allows for instant access to, and dissemination of, information around the globe. Access to social media in low- and middle-income countries has increased exponentially in recent years due to technological advances. Despite this growth, the use of social media in low- and middle-income countries is less well-researched than in high-income countries.
Objective
To identify, explore and summarize the current state of the literature on the use of social media for health in low- and middle-income countries.
Methods
A scoping review was conducted on literature available to December 2017. Six databases were searched, and grey literature was identified through the Google and Google Scholar search engines. Literature was considered for inclusion if it (1) was published in English, (2) was conducted in or in relation to a low or middle-income country, (3) reported on as least one type of social media or social media use generally for health purposes, and (4) reported on at least one aspect of human health. Content analysis was performed to identify themes.
Results
Forty articles met the inclusion criteria. Thirty-one were research articles, and nine were review/discussion/descriptive and evaluative reports. Since 2010, when the first article was published, most of the literature has focused on Asian (n = 15) and African (n = 12) countries. Twitter (n = 11) and Facebook (n = 10) were the most frequently discussed individual social media platforms. Four themes were identified: (1) use for health education and influence (sub-themes were health behaviour and health education); (2) use within infectious disease and outbreak situations; (3) use within natural disaster, terrorism, crisis and emergency response situations; and (4) producers and consumers of social media for health (sub-themes were misinformation, organizational challenges, users’ expectations, and challenges of unique sub-populations). Most studies addressed more than one theme.
Conclusion
Social media has the ability to facilitate disease surveillance, mass communication, health education, knowledge translation, and collaboration amongst health providers in low- and middle-income countries. Misinformation or poorly communicated information can contribute to negative health behaviours and adverse health outcomes amongst consumers, as well as hysteria and chaos. Organizations using social media should provide accurate and readable information. Promotion of credible social media sites by governments, health care professionals and researchers, as well as education on the appropriate use of social media, could help to lessen the effect of misinformation. This is a nascent body of literature and future research should investigate the relative effectiveness of various platforms for different users, other potential uses, and pursue a broader geographical focus.
Social network sites (SNSs) are considered a convenient platform for social comparison. Current SNS social comparison research typically focuses on the activity of SNS browsing, which overlooks other use patterns available in the social media environment. Also, little research recognizes the two-dimensional nature of social comparison. Drawing on literature of social comparison and the activity-audience framework of social media use, we studied social comparison as a personal characteristic (social comparison orientation; SCO) relating to college students’ social adjustment via various Instagram activities and interactants. Implications of both dimensions of SCO were explored through survey data from 208 U.S. college undergraduates (Mage = 19.43, 78% female). Social comparison orientation of ability (SCO-Ability) was related to poorer college social adjustment whereas social comparison orientation of opinion (SCO-Opinion) was related to better adjustment. Both types of SCO had a positive indirect association with adjustment via more frequent Instagram interaction with on-campus friends. SCO-Opinion was related to more Instagram interaction with off-campus friends, which was related to poorer social adjustment, but the overall indirect path was non-significant. Both types of SCO were also related to more frequent Instagram browsing. The study underscores the significance of recognizing SCO as a two-dimensional construct and illustrates how SCO can associate with social well-being in the social media context.
Among the Essentials of technology, the effect of social media on people has been an important issue which increases day by day. The aim of this study is to determine the purpose of students’ social media use and also to determine their perspectives on education. The participants of the study are 170 students from different departments at the Near East University. The age average of participant students of the research is 22. This study was held in fall semester of 2016-2017. According to the study findings, the students had an effective role on acquisition of information on social media and this provided effective learning which means easy sharing of information. Also; it has been reported that, the information that students get through the groups contributed to their lesson achievements and together with other multimedia tools this environment increased their motivation. This means that; the broadcasts through social media or the record of the lessons provide advantages in using the social media in education. So that, the students may repeat the lesson according to their pace. The social media improves the cooperative learning of the students and their communication with the teachers become easier which means, in terms of student centered education the use of social media is very essential.
Purpose
Considering working in the digital age, questions on the consequences for the individual workers are, so far, often neglected. The purpose of this paper is to deal with the question of whether the digital competences of the workforce is a research topic. The authors argue for the thesis that it is indeed a research topic.
Design/methodology/approach
In addition to a literature analysis of the top IS, HR, and learning publications, non-scientific sources, as well as the opinions of the authors, are included. The authors’ thesis is challenged through a debate of corresponding pros and cons.
Findings
The definition of digital competences lacks scientific depth. Focussing on the workforce is valid, as a “lifelong” perspective is not mandatory for research. Digital competence research is a multidisciplinary task to which the IS field can make a valuable contribution.
Research limitations/implications
Although relevant references are included, some aspects are mainly driven by the opinions of the authors. The theoretical implications encompass a call for a scientific definition of digital competences. Furthermore, scholars should focus on the competences of the workforce, including occupations, roles, or industries. The authors conclude by providing a first proposal of a research agenda.
Practical implications
The practical implications include the alignment of multiple stakeholders for the design of “digital” curricula and the integration by HR departments of the construct of digital competences, e.g. for compensation matters and job requirements.
Originality/value
This paper is one of very few contributions in the area of the digital competences of the workforce, and it presents a starting point for future research activities.
This survey study investigated 186 secondary 2–5 school students from two schools to understand how and why they used new social media both in and outside of school to consume, share, and create content. It found that whereas students tend to consume and share more social media content outside of school they create more in school. Perceived importance of sharing content with peers or others is the most significant predictor having positive impact on all social media activities, both in and outside school. However, the negative impact of self-regulation ability on outside school social media activities implies the conscientiousness of their social media engagement, which calls for a further investigation on the quality of the social media content.
The paper concerns the issue of student's involvement in projects related to science-business cooperation, especially in the aspect of the development of their professional skills during academic training. The studies were the starting point for a reflection on students' interest in developing additional practical skills during their studies, and their knowledge of the essence of innovation and science-business cooperation. The issues concerning the role of students in science-business cooperation and the factors motivating and demotivating students to undertake such activity were also raised in the paper.
Social media has recently gained tremendous fame as a highly impactful channel of communication in these modern times of digitised living. It has been put on a pedestal across varied streams for facilitating participatory interaction amongst businesses, groups, societies, organisations, consumers, communities, forums, and the like. This subject has received increased attention in the literature with many of its practical applications including social media marketing (SMM) being elaborated, analysed, and recorded by many studies. This study is aimed at collating the existing research on SMM to present a review of seventy-one articles that will bring together the many facets of this rapidly blooming media marketing form. The surfacing limitations in the literature on social media have also been identified and potential research directions have been offered.
The concept of a digital generation has been dominating the public discourse on the role of digital media in young people’s lives. Issues concerning a digital generation is closely linked to questions about how we develop an education system that is able to face the challenges of the 21st Century. A growing field of research, inclined to raise awareness of present and future challenges for our education system, is ‘media/digital literacy’. This article examines research within ‘generation studies’ and public constructions of young people and digital media. Further the article presents some developments within ‘new literacy studies’ and different aspects of ‘competencies for the 21st Century’. Next, the article reflects different approaches to studying these competencies, based on different empirical data, both from my own research and that of colleagues. Towards the end the important question of inclusion and exclusion is raised. The objective is to explore some issues of importance for future development of media literacy, the educational use of digital tools and critical considerations of a digital generation. A key part of the article is the elaboration of five dimensions representing different focus areas of research on school-based studies of media literacy.
The propensity of college students to post content that they know may be unacceptable to future employers or other authority figures has been well established. Yet research on this topic has tended to focus exclusively on Facebook, which is problematic for two reasons. First, many young social media users are shifting away from Facebook and towards Twitter and other services. Second, college students have changed their use of social media over time and may now be more cautious about what they post on Facebook. To address this issue, a survey-based field study was conducted to compare student comfort levels with authority figures viewing their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Specifically, undergraduate business students attending a large university in the midwest of the USA were surveyed about their Facebook and Twitter accounts. Findings indicate that college students are markedly less comfortable with authority figures viewing their Twitter accounts. Paradoxically, a great majority of the study respondents were found to have public Twitter accounts, while only a very small minority have public Facebook accounts. This finding suggests that students perceive less risk on Twitter versus Facebook or that they are writing to different imagined audiences on the two platforms. Implications include the need for further inquiry and an awareness of educators and human resources professionals about students’ current social media practices.
Digital technologies have made networks ubiquitous. A growing body of research is examining these networks to gain a better understanding of how firms interact with their consumers, how people interact with each other, and how current and future digital artifacts will continue to alter business and society. The increasing availability of massive networked data has led to several streams of inquiry across fields as diverse as computer science, economics, information systems, marketing, physics, and sociology. Each of these research streams asks questions that at their core involve "information in networks"-its distribution, its diffusion, its inferential value, and its influence on social and economic outcomes. We suggest a broad direction for research into social and economic networks. Our analysis describes four kinds of investigation that seem most promising. The first studies how information technologies create and reveal networks whose connections represent social and economic relationships. The second examines the content that flows through networks and its economic, social, and organizational implications. A third develops theories and methods to understand and utilize the rich predictive information contained in networked data. A final area of inquiry focuses on network dynamics and how information technology affects network evolution. We conclude by discussing several important crosscutting issues with implications for all four research streams, which must be addressed if the ensuing research is to be both rigorous and relevant. We also describe how these directions of inquiry are interconnected: results and ideas will pollinate across them, leading to a new cumulative research tradition.
Social media are fundamentally changing the way we communicate, collaborate, consume, and create. They represent one of the most transformative impacts of information technology on business, both within and outside firm boundaries. This special issue was designed to stimulate innovative investigations of the relationship between social media and business transformation. In this paper we outline a broad research agenda for understanding the relationships among social media, business, and society. We place the papers comprising the special issue within this research framework and identify areas where further research is needed. We hope that the flexible framework we outline will help guide future research and develop a cumulative research tradition in this area.
This paper addresses digital diversity among upper secondary students. Since 2006 digital skills and competence has been embedded as key competence in the Norwegian national curriculum. A sample of 593 Norwegian students from 43 upper secondary schools participated in a survey with a digital competence quiz and a self-report questionnaire. Analysis showed differences in students' digital competence and indication of digital diversity on both student and school level. A multilevel analysis reveals that cultural capital, language integration at home, self-efficacy, strategic use of information and average grades of the students predict 20% of the variation in students' digital competence score and 49% of the variation between schools' average digital competence score.
Web 2.0 technologies are becoming more popular in the everyday lives of students. As a result, teachers and designers have begun to explore their use in formal education. This paper presents evaluation findings from a collective case study of six Web 2.0 implementations in Australian higher education. The research was undertaken as part of a larger study that sought to understand how today’s students use information and communication technologies to support their learning. Conducted across three universities, the research included a range of disciplines, class sizes and year levels. A common evaluation strategy was used in order to collect comparable data from which commonalities and differences could be identified. This paper provides an overview of the study, describes the methodology used, summarises the implementation experiences of staff and students involved and presents the key findings. The results suggest that most students had little prior experience with relevant technologies and that many struggled to see the value of using Web 2.0 technologies for learning and teaching, both of which have important implications for the design of appropriate learning tasks. While the argument can be made for improving the design through better task-technology alignment, this study also highlights inherent tensions between Web 2.0 and educational practices.
Please cite this article in press as: van Deursen, A.J.A.M., et al., Rethinking Internet skills. The contribution of gender, age, education, Internet experience, and hours online to medium-and content-related Internet skills. Poetics (2011), doi: Abstract This paper focuses on one of the factors that appears to be important in several conceptualizations of how to approach the digital divide: the differential possession of so-called Internet skills. Three large-scale performance tests are conducted to reveal the contributions of gender, age, educational level of attainment, Internet experience, and amount of Internet use on both medium-and content-related Internet skills. Age appears to have a negative influence on medium-related skills. However, there is a positive contribution to the level of content-related skills, meaning that older generations perform better than the younger. Unfortunately, they are impeded by their low level of medium-related skills in such a way that the actual result is negative. This noteworthy conclusion, to our knowledge, has hardly received any attention in digital divide research. Educational attainment appears significant for both medium-and content-related Internet skills. This conclusion contrasts somewhat with other research that claims that people learn digital skills more in practice than in formal educational settings. Internet experience only contributes to medium-related skills. It appears that content-related skills do not grow with years of Internet experience and the number of hours spent online weekly. The latter only has some effect on medium-related skills.
People who have grown up with digital media are often assumed to be universally savvy with information and communication technologies. Such assumptions are rarely grounded in empirical evidence, however. This article draws on unique data with information about a diverse group of young adults’ Internet uses and skills to suggest that even when controlling for Internet access and experiences, people differ in their online abilities and activities. Additionally, findings suggest that Internet know-how is not randomly distributed among the population, rather, higher levels of parental education, being a male, and being white or Asian American are associated with higher levels of Web-use skill. These user characteristics are also related to the extent to which young adults engage in diverse types of online activities. Moreover, skill itself is positively associated with types of uses. Overall, these findings suggest that even when controlling for basic Internet access, among a group of young adults, socioeconomic status is an important predictor of how people are incorporating the Web into their everyday lives with those from more privileged backgrounds using it in more informed ways for a larger number of activities.
Based on the PISA data in 2003 and 2006, this paper develops a hierarchical linear model to identify multi-level explanatory variables of the divide of adolescents’ self-reported digital skills. At the country-level, the study finds a generally negative relationship between the ICT penetration rate of a country and adolescents’ digital skills, implying that increased ICT penetration rate does not guarantee that adolescents have more chance to learn and use ICTs. Educational expenditure on secondary education is positively related to digital skills in 2006, but not in 2003. At the school-level, whether the school is public or private does not elicit impact on adolescents’ self-reported digital skills; school ICT access is positively related to students’ self-reported digital skills. At the individual-level, self-reported digital skills is affected by home ICT access, adolescents’ Socio-Economic Status, gender and their history of using ICTs. The cross-level interaction effect of ICT penetration rate and home ICT access on self-reported digital skills is significant in the 2003 model, but not significant in the 2006 model. The cross-level interaction effect of ICT penetration rate and school ICT access is significant in the 2006 model. The interaction effect of school ICT access and home ICT access is not supported by the dataset of either year.
Personality traits and social network sites usage habits: a research on university students
- Dal
An application on the use of internet and social media
- Solmaz
Spendings on social media as part of marketing budgets
- Róbert
Digital Competence in Practice: An Analysis of Framework”, Publications Office of the European Union
- Anusca Ferrari
Social media adaptation as a business platform: an integrated tam-toe framework
- Tripopsakul