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Posts tagged ‘instant messaging’

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Does using social media make your writing gooder?

Texting on a keyboard phone
Image via Wikipedia

While the results of this survey by the National Literacy Trust are hardly conclusive, students who engaged in higher levels of social networking tending to consider themselves better writers.

A survey of 3,001 children aged nine to 16 found that 24% had their own blog and 82% sent text messages at least once a month.

In addition 73% used instant messaging services to chat online with friends.

Of the children who neither blogged nor used social network sites, 47% rated their writing as “good” or “very good”, while 61% of the bloggers and 56% of the social networkers said the same.

The results seem to be positive, but there’s a difference between believing that you’re good at something and it actually being true (see American Idol). However, you can’t downplay the role of self-confidence and peer recognition in education. If the student believes in themself, they’ll try harder which certainly can lead to improvement.

One note. David Worthington makes a great point about this article.

I would like to see any cross tabs that detail their income levels, and whether their parents (or caregivers) were college educated. We’ve all heard about the digital divide, where lower income students lack Internet access. This could be just another example of it manifesting itself.

Very valid point. That being said, we’ve all heard wonderful anecdotal stories of the benefits of blogging and social media when used with students. It’s nice to hear the beginnings of some people attempting to quantify it. Something to keep an eye on.

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12/14/2009 13 Comments
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Day 14: Leave a Message at the Beep

Since I’m posting this one on a Friday evening at 10:00pm (yeah, the day kinda slipped away from me), and this week’s challenges have been fairly ‘meaty’, I figure it’s time for an easy one. In order to pass this challenge, all you need to do is look at your front page and ask yourself the question, “If somebody wanted to contact me, is it incredibly obvious how to do so?” If a total technophobe couldn’t figure out how to contact you directly from your front page, then it’s time to correct that.

Throughout the course of my blogging career, there have been dozens of times when I’ve needed to get in touch with somebody directly and been unable to find a means for doing so. There are several very prominent bloggers who do not have contact information for themselves readily accessible. To be honest, I’m stunned by that. If you’re taking the time to publish and share publicly, why wouldn’t you give people plenty of ways to communicate with you as needed?

There are some people who have tried to tell me that’s what comments are for. The only trouble with that is when the message I want to pass along has NOTHING to do with any of the posts on the blog. I hate leaving a comment that is completely unrelated to the post I’m leaving it on. Call it a pet peeve if you will, I call it poor blogging etiquette.

There are a few ways you can rectify this. Some people put their contact information in the sidebar, which is obviously the easiest for people to find. Personally, since I like to provide a variety of ways for people to get in touch with me, I created a Contact page and listed it in my navigation bar. On that contact page, I have two emails, my IM information, my Skype name and an embedded form that will get sent directly to me via email. People do use that constantly as it saves them the trouble of copying and pasting my email address into a mail application. It’s just a plugin I found that works for WordPress, but there are a number of other solutions. I do consider that to be an ‘extra’, and certainly not required. So long as you have at the minimum an email address for people to use, that’s plenty.

Some people I know are very worried about spammers and spiders grabbing their email address or link off of open web pages and flooding their accounts with junk. This would be particular worrisome for a work or school email account. Personally, I’m not so concerned about it, which is why I keep my address public. But if you ARE worried, stop by the Email Icon Generator. Put in your email address, style it, and it’ll generate an IMAGE that spells out your email address. That way people can see it clearly, but there is no text there for spammers to grab. Sneaky, eh?

You never know when or why people might want to contact you, why make it difficult for them to do so? Check into your contact information and make sure it’s easily accessible from the front page!

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

11/14/2008 8 Comments