Facebook changes privacy settings, again

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Facebook is making changes to its privacy settings, The New York Times reports. First, it is improving some privacy protections. The company is adding a new top-level control, called Privacy Shortcuts, that will allow people to quickly change who can see their “stuff” (as Facebook calls it) and who can contact them through the website. The shortcut will also feature a one-button link to block someone on Facebook. In a phone interview, Sam Lessin, Facebook’s director of product, said these shortcuts will always be visible to people on Facebook as they navigate the site. He added that highlighting the ability to block someone is an increasingly useful feature…

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Social media’s impact in the higher-ed classroom

Higher-ed’s use of social media tools such as Twitter is changing rapidly.

Higher education’s use of social media in the classroom is expanding and changing, with younger faculty members leading the way and influencing how tools such as Facebook, Twitter, and video are used, according to an October 2012 survey.

“Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts and Facebook: How Today’s Higher Education Faculty Use Social Media” surveyed of nearly 4,000 teaching faculty from all disciplines in higher education. The third annual survey represents U.S. higher education professors and examined both the personal and professional impacts of social media. The report comes from the Babson Survey Research Group and Pearson.

“Faculty are clearly becoming more comfortable leveraging social media in their personal, professional and instructional lives,” said Jeff Seaman, Ph.D., co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group. “Social media is no longer seen as time-consuming to learn and use, which shows that faculty are more proficient and better acquainted with the social media tools available to them.”…Read More

Number of college applications affected by social media triples

In 2008, only 10 percent of colleges checked applicants’ Facebook pages; now, one in four do.

College applicants shouldn’t shut down their various social media accounts, experts said, but they should heavily edit their online comments, photos, and videos, as thousands of applications were marred last year by scandalous Facebook and Twitter activity.

It’s no secret that college and university admissions officers run semi-frequent social media checks of prospective students, but the practice has turned increasingly dismal for students who failed, in one way or another, to exercise Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and YouTube caution.

Admissions officers who responded to a national survey this fall said the percentage of applications that had been negatively affected by social media searches had nearly tripled, from 12 percent in 2010 to 35 percent in 2011.…Read More

Gates Foundation supports college readiness apps

More than half of community college students require a remedial class.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is awarding upwards of $100,000 to developers who propose apps and online tools that help high school students prepare for college, fund their schooling, and complete the sometimes circuitous application process.

The College Knowledge Challenge started Sept. 27 at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., where 100 developers gathered for a “hack-a-thon”–an effort to create useful technologies aimed at better preparing incoming college students as the need for remedial classes continues to rise across the U.S.

Anyone can submit a proposal to the Gates Foundation through the organization’s website. Winners of the $2.5 million grant competition will be announced in January, according to the foundation.…Read More

Tufts U uses ‘Vibe’ in massive outreach to prospective students

Tufts tries to draw people to Facebook without driving them away from other content.

Dean Tsouvalas, editor-in-chief of StudentAdvisor.com, recently interviewed Daniel Grayson, associate director of undergraduate admissions at Tufts University, which ranked 81st on StudentAdvisor’s Top 100 Social Media Colleges.

Grayson pushed to begin Tufts’ social media outreach and founded the admissions presences on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and CollegeConfidential.com, as well as managing the development of Tufts Admissions’ blogging from a single wordpress-hosted blog in 2008 to several dozen bloggers on an integrated blogging platform today.

He currently oversees Tufts admissions web outreach strategy, including the management and development of admissions.tufts.edu.  His tenure at Tufts stretches into its seventh year for 2012-2013, with experience reading applications within the United States and abroad.…Read More

University’s Facebook experiment makes political waves

A Facebook ad may have driven 280,000 Americans to the polls in 2010.

A University of California (UC) San Diego researcher who helped prove well-placed Election Day Facebook ads could boost voter turnout said social media could be the most effective way to get Americans to the voting booth this November.

A UC San Diego research team on the day of the 2010 midterm elections posted a reminder to vote on the Facebook pages of 61 million Americans. The “Today is Election Day” banner ad linked to polling place information and displayed photos of users’ Facebook friends who had said they voted.

A control group of 600,000 Facebook members did not receive the voting reminder in their news feeds, and another 600,000 were shown a modified version of the Election Day message without the pictures of friends next to the news feed item.…Read More

Experts: Go all in with Facebook for college admissions—or don’t bother

Two percent of colleges said they don’t use Facebook for admissions purposes.

Colleges and universities that don’t have the staff resources to consistently update an admissions-based Facebook page shouldn’t be on the site at all, social media experts said.

Varsity Outreach, an organization that documents higher education’s use of social networking, released a report Sept. 12 that shows a steady uptick in the number of schools using the world’s most popular social network to attract and engage prospective students.

Eighty-six percent of the 160 campuses surveyed said they use Facebook as an online admissions tool, up from 79 percent in 2011. The survey showed a sharp increase in colleges that target admitted students on Facebook: Eight in 10 colleges connect with recruits and admits, helping those who have already gained admittance to connect with other freshmen.…Read More

Universities to students, fans: Don’t recruit athletes via social media

Colleges have asked students to stop making Facebook pages for potential recruits.

Brigham Young University (BYU) last week became the latest school to plead with its students and supporters to avoid Twitter and Facebook recruitment of high school athletes more than two years after the NCAA first warned against the practice.

BYU’s compliance office dispatched a tweet Aug. 16 asking campus sports fans to extricate themselves from the recruitment process.

“Boosters/Fans: Please do not use @”insert prospect twitter handle” to encourage enrollment at BYU. Leave the recruiting to the coaches!”…Read More

Does Facebook use lead to depression? No, says Wisconsin study

A study of university students is the first evidence to refute the supposed link between depression and the amount of time spent on Facebook and other social media sites, ScienceBlog reports.

The study, from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, suggests that it might be unnecessarily alarming to advise patients and parents on the risk of “Facebook depression” based solely on the amount of internet use. The results were published online July 10 in the Journal of Adolescent Health.

Last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics released a report on the effects of social media on children and adolescents. The report suggested that exposure to Facebook could lead to depression. UW researchers, led by Lauren Jelenchick and Dr. Megan Moreno, surveyed 190 UW-Madison students between the ages of 18 and 23, using a real-time assessment of internet activity and a validated, clinical screening method for depression. The study found that the survey participants were on Facebook for over half of their total time online. …Read More

How UF uses social media, videos to engage stakeholders

UF promotes videos on Facebook that promote a response.

Dean Tsouvalas, editor-in-chief of StudentAdvisor.com, recently interviewed Bruce Floyd, social media specialist at the University of Florida, about the university’s social media strategy. The University of Florida was ranked No. 14 on the website’s Top 100 Social Media Colleges rankings for spring 2012.

UF is a major public land-grant research university. As the state’s oldest and most comprehensive university, UF offers more than 100 undergraduate degrees and more than 200 graduate degrees. It is one of only six universities in the country with colleges of law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, and veterinary medicine on one central campus. UF is also one of only 17 public, land-grant universities that belong to the Association of American Universities.

In the interview, Floyd discusses how UF manages more than 200 social media accounts and how it engages followers on various social media platforms. He also shares his advice for social media success.…Read More

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