If I could choose any person to be my research mentor it would be Dr. Preece. This woman has a 35 page CV online describing her incredible academic career. As early as 1975 she was working on e-learning initiatives in the UK and after completing her PhD studies in 1985 she pursued research focused on ground-breaking topics such as information systems, computer mediated communication, human?computer interaction, and online communities. She eventually moved to the USA in 1996 to lecture in the University of Maryland Baltimore County, in the Information Systems Department. Today she is the Dean of this department, supporting a long list of PhD students. Her work has taken her all around the globe, she has published hundreds of papers and authored numerous HCI books. She has achieved so much, in what had been a traditionally male dominated field. Her career is certainly something to aspire to.

The Only Real Social Media Expert

Dr. Preece’s current research focuses on the design and management of digital social media, and it’s quite possible that Dr. Preece is one of the only people qualified to call themselves an actual “social media expert”. Back in 2000 when social media was just a glint in Biz Stone and Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes Dr. Preece was hard at work bringing together the usability focus of human-computer interaction and the broader human focus of sociability. She introduced the significance of understanding the interrelationships between people’s behaviour online, sociability and usability. She illustrated how people’s interactions create online communities, and that developers can influence their success or failure by how they design software and polices. This was a novel approach that she continues to pursue today.

I would love to bump into Dr. Preece someday, but it’s not because I would love to pick her brain about all of these fascinating topics we share an interest in. Instead I would ask her to tell me her story, because I bet it’s an incredible one.

This post was written for Ada Lovelace Day – an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.

I’m Mark Siggins – final year Cyberpsychology student in IADT and I’m looking for some volunteers for my MSc. Project. Its a study of Irish mobile phone usage and what happens when people are separated from their mobile phones. I’ve set up an online survey to get suitable participants (You must own a mobile phone, be aged 18-40 and live in Ireland).

A link to the questionnaire can be found here.

The online part takes about ten minutes and of course all replies will be confidential. The second part of the study will involve analysing your phone use for a 12 hour period – it’s explained in more detail in the questionnaire, but if anyone has any questions or concerns them please contact me at this address – siggins.mark@gmail.com

Thank you for your assistance.

Mark is looking for people to fill out his questionnaire and also for anyone willing to participate in an experiment – to go 12 hours without their mobile phone. If you’re up for the challenge I think this would be an eye opening experience. Of course, you can still fill out the survey without taking part in the experiment, as frightening as the thought might be.

I’m very much looking forward to the results of this research and hope to be able to publish a summary here when Mark has submitted his thesis to the college.

I was ready to be a part of the next big technological breakthrough and I would be on hand to make sure it was as user friendly as possible and universal in its design and truly beneficial in its functionality. The prototypes I had project managed and been a part of during my undergrad course in Psychology Applied to I.T had all been focused on being helpful in their own little way – gadgets, websites or instructional programs that certainly weren’t playthings. With my knowledge of psychology I was prepared to take on the technology world and make it less frustrating and remove the exclusivity barrier around it. I was excited to finally be a part of an iterative design process that would actually reach the end – a product! a website! an application! anything! I wanted to be a part of something good and wholesome. I wanted to be able to stand up and say “I worked on that!” when someone was showing off their amazing new smartphone or trying out a new feature on a social networking site. I wanted to be a part of ubiquitous computing and augmented reality, to be a part of a user experience research team into the latest and greatest of what was yet to come.

I was young and naive.

In the last three years I’ve worked a steady full-time job in the civil service (that I’d give up in a heartbeat for a chance to work or intern in any usability related field) and been awarded a first in my masters in Cyberpsychology. Yet I still feel like I’m just getting older and going nowhere fast.

So for 2010 I’ve set myself a serious ultimatum.

If by August of this year I still have no work experience related to my desired career path I will uproot and move to London for a year to study at City University London. They have an incredible course there called the MSc in Human-Centred Systems which could turn me into a real usability specialist. It’s especially appealing to me because it has a 6 months work experience program, which is seemingly essential for securing an entry level position here in Ireland.

The idea of moving to London is scarier than ever with a recession in full swing. It may never pay off for me, but I’d rather try a little harder instead of failing by waiting around and hoping everything will eventually fall into place for me.

Between now and August I’ll be trying to secure myself that ever elusive Irish based internship or entry level job in usability and interaction design. If you know anyone looking for a helper monkey, please do let me know. I’m passionate and a quick learner, and will accept payment in bananas.

My name is Graham and I am doing a thesis on Facebook usage. The following is a link to a secure survey that I have made, asking basic Facebook usage questions and also incorporating a short personality questionnaire.

Open The Survey In A New Window

The whole survey will take no more than five minutes to do and is completely confidential; I can assure you that it is also anonymous. You need only type your initials. I would really appreciate it if you could find the time to do it, as I am struggling to get the required numbers. The only stipulation is that you are Irish, over 24, and have a facebbok profile. Thanking you in advance.

Graham Gilbert
Final Year MSc Cyberpsychology student at IADT

I’m rather interested in the results of this study and hopefully will be able to share the results of Graham’s study with you next year.

Having very much enjoyed this same event last year

Talks of interest to a Cyberpsychologist?

Mark Campbell from eMedia will be showcasing 3D Medical animations employed as elearning tools for life sciences.

Ronan Skehill from YourPinPoints shall discuss the business, societal and privacy issues surrounding location based services.

PhD Researcher David McKeown will be discussing the shortcomings of 2D mice and keyboards being used to interface with 3D environments, and demonstrating the use of wiimotes with 3D PC applications and robots.

Artist Miriam Lohan will introduce Sound Mapping – how to read a map by listening, perceiving presence and filtering information for navigation or pleasure.

PhD Student Fabiano Pinatti will explore how technology can support the nomadic/mobile aspects of modern work and life.

This research found that in comparison to 2006 there are far more female bloggers and that the majority of bloggers are no longer based within the IT industry. Non-Bloggers were found to be more concerned about the persistent nature of the Internet than Bloggers, but both had similar concern for issues of online privacy. Results found that Irish internet users have no preference for reading blogs based outside of Ireland and that the majority read a mixture of both Irish and international blogs, and did not rate either as more credible than the other. It was found that Irish internet users do not perceive it as highly important to know the identity of a blog author, but that over 60% of Irish bloggers publish online using their real name.

The primary motivation for Irish bloggers is the ability to articulate their ideas through writing and almost 52% consider their blogging as a form of journalism. The majority of Bloggers indicated that they have never lied on their blogs and that they actively attempt to verify information before posting an article. It was found that 35% of Irish bloggers do not feel connected to the Irish blogosphere, and that the most common blogosphere identified with was based around the author’s interests rather than geography. Most importantly, it was found that the impact of blogging on blogger’s lives was in no way negative and very positive in some respects.

This research is the first to investigate the psychological areas of interest surrounding blogging applied to an Irish audience, and though estimates have suggested only 1% of the Irish online population are blogging, this is steadily increasing. 35% of the Non-Bloggers surveyed indicated they had plans to blog in the future and blogging is definitely becoming increasingly more popular in Ireland, as demonstrated by the 40% increase in blogs registered at Irishblogs.ie between July 2008 and February 2009.

An increase in blogging in Ireland would be welcome due to its predominantly positive effects, such as increasing our shared intellectual capital, and, as this research indicates, blogging can in fact increase social capital too.

Furthermore, most previous research with regard to blogging has focused on personal journal style blogging, and it could be assumed that bloggers who are motivated by personal reasons were unrepresented in the sample that participated in this research. However, this could also suggest that Irish bloggers are actually less inclined to write what is considered a traditional form of blog – the diary style journal. This could indicate a cultural difference between Irish and non-Irish bloggers, or, a categorisation issue with regard to previous blog research.

Blogs are a highly personalised medium with the ability to involve the reading public in an integral manner, and unlike the traditional media they are not edited or gate kept and for this reason traditional journalists argue about how much trust to place in the content of blogs, however, it is argued that the comments system facilitates peer review.

It has been suggested that there aren’t many bloggers in Ireland and therefore there have been few arguments over the differences between journalists and bloggers in Ireland. Nevertheless, this research found that almost 52% of Irish bloggers consider their blogging as a form of journalism, with over 58% of this group using their real name to publish online.

However, over 10% of bloggers described incidents where content was illegitimately sourced from their blogs by the traditional Irish media. Over 58% of this content was written work and almost 30% was in the form of either photographs or photo-shopped images.

Due to the archiving feature of blogging this could suggest that bloggers are less likely to lie on their blogs in comparison to other online mediums, such as synchronous chat. However, with regard to blogging there are issues of identity concealment to consider, whilst deceptive, they are necessary to preserve the bloggers’ privacy.

Correspondingly, this research found that over 86% of bloggers indicated that they actively attempt to verify information before posting it on their blog, and 87% indicated that they had never published a lie on their blog. Of the small number of bloggers that had posted a lie, the majority done so to either to maintain their anonymity or for the purposes of fiction/satire or to embellish a story.

The majority of both bloggers and non-bloggers indicated that they had at least once attempted to double check information found on both Irish and non-Irish blogs, with only approx. 15% having never done this. However, this doesn’t necessarily indicate low levels of trust in the medium, but does perhaps point toward an awareness of the fact that blog publishing is unregulated.

Interestingly of the approx. 40% that blog using a pseudonym, 23% of this group also blogged using their real name. This suggests that some bloggers are taking advantage of both the benefits of blogging as themselves i.e benefits to reputation, and also anonymously somewhere else online. Anonymity online can help individuals to explore their identity, reduce shyness and encourage interactions with others online.

Though the Internet does help to support strong tie relationships, it is particularity effective for weak tie groups, allowing for the efficient flow of information and facilitating the development of ideas, blogospheres are a particularly good example of how the internet facilitates this.

The blogosphere is a classic social network but its characteristics differentiate it from most social networks, where communication is predominantly verbal and unrecorded. Networks of bloggers will often aggregate all of their individual blogs to a centralised location online, and these are referred to as planet aggregators an example of which is Irishblogs.ie.

However, some blogs are more connected to a blogosphere than others, with some bloggers not being connected to any blogosphere at all. Over 65% of bloggers indicated that they were listed on an Irish planet aggregator, and almost 64% consider themselves a member of the Irish blogosphere. The remaining bloggers indicated that they were not listed and did not consider themselves part of the Irish blogosphere. This highlights the 35% of bloggers unconnected from the Irish blogosphere, and this could suggest that there are far more Irish people blogging than is known.

It was assumed that non-bloggers would rate blogs based outside of Ireland as more credible than Irish blogs. However, out of a maximum score of 20 the non-bloggers rated Irish blogs with a mean score of 13.02 and non-Irish blogs with 12.64. The mean rating of the credibility of Irish blogs was actually slightly higher, though not significantly so.

Previous research has suggested that the more an individual relies on a source, the higher credibility they attribute to it, and the bloggers did rate the overall credibility of blogs higher than the non-bloggers. However, neither the bloggers nor the non-bloggers rated either Irish blogs or non-Irish blogs as significantly higher in credibility than the other. Incidentally, without a comparison to credibility scores of the traditional forms of Irish media this rating can only be used to compare the two categories investigated – Irish blogs and non-Irish blogs.

Additionally, approximately 50% of both groups said that they read a mixture of both Irish and non-Irish blogs, and approx. 35% said that they primarily read Irish blogs. Both the bloggers and non-bloggers indicated that they believed that blogging was more popular in other countries, and both groups thought that the medium was popular, but not “very popular” worldwide.