TY - JOUR A1 - Ellis, Jason Brent A1 - Abreu-Ellis, Carla Reis T1 - Student Perspectives of Social Networking use in Higher Education JF - KEYCIT 2014 - Key Competencies in Informatics and ICT N2 - Social networks are currently at the forefront of tools that lend to Personal Learning Environments (PLEs). This study aimed to observe how students perceived PLEs, what they believed were the integral components of social presence when using Facebook as part of a PLE, and to describe student’s preferences for types of interactions when using Facebook as part of their PLE. This study used mixed methods to analyze the perceptions of graduate and undergraduate students on the use of social networks, more specifically Facebook as a learning tool. Fifty surveys were returned representing a 65 % response rate. Survey questions included both closed and open-ended questions. Findings suggested that even though students rated themselves relatively well in having requisite technology skills, and 94 % of students used Facebook primarily for social use, they were hesitant to migrate these skills to academic use because of concerns of privacy, believing that other platforms could fulfil the same purpose, and by not seeing the validity to use Facebook in establishing social presence. What lies at odds with these beliefs is that when asked to identify strategies in Facebook that enabled social presence to occur in academic work, the majority of students identified strategies in five categories that lead to social presence establishment on Facebook during their coursework. KW - Social KW - networks KW - higher KW - education KW - personal KW - learning KW - environments KW - Facebook Y1 - 2015 U6 - http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn:nbn:de:kobv:517-opus4-82632 SN - 1868-0844 SN - 2191-1940 IS - 7 SP - 117 EP - 131 PB - Universitätsverlag Potsdam CY - Potsdam ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Puri, Manish A1 - Varde, Aparna S. A1 - Melo, Gerard de T1 - Commonsense based text mining on urban policy JF - Language resources and evaluation N2 - Local laws on urban policy, i.e., ordinances directly affect our daily life in various ways (health, business etc.), yet in practice, for many citizens they remain impervious and complex. This article focuses on an approach to make urban policy more accessible and comprehensible to the general public and to government officials, while also addressing pertinent social media postings. Due to the intricacies of the natural language, ranging from complex legalese in ordinances to informal lingo in tweets, it is practical to harness human judgment here. To this end, we mine ordinances and tweets via reasoning based on commonsense knowledge so as to better account for pragmatics and semantics in the text. Ours is pioneering work in ordinance mining, and thus there is no prior labeled training data available for learning. This gap is filled by commonsense knowledge, a prudent choice in situations involving a lack of adequate training data. The ordinance mining can be beneficial to the public in fathoming policies and to officials in assessing policy effectiveness based on public reactions. This work contributes to smart governance, leveraging transparency in governing processes via public involvement. We focus significantly on ordinances contributing to smart cities, hence an important goal is to assess how well an urban region heads towards a smart city as per its policies mapping with smart city characteristics, and the corresponding public satisfaction. KW - Commonsense reasoning KW - Opinion mining KW - Ordinances KW - Smart cities KW - Social KW - media KW - Text mining Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09584-6 SN - 1574-020X SN - 1574-0218 VL - 57 SP - 733 EP - 763 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Ramakrishnan, Anjali A1 - Kalkuhl, Matthias A1 - Ahmad, Sohail A1 - Creutzig, Felix T1 - Keeping up with the Patels BT - conspicuous consumption drives the adoption of cars and appliances in India JF - Energy research & social science N2 - End-users base their consumption decisions not only on available budget and direct use value, but also on their social environment. The underlying social dynamics are particularly important in the case of consumer goods that implicate high future energy demand and are, hence, also key for climate mitigation. This paper investigates the impact of social factors, with a focus on 'status perceptions', on car and appliance ownerships by urban India households. Using two rounds of the household-level data from the India Human Development Survey (IHDS, 2005 and 2012), we test for the impact of social factors in addition to economic, demographic, locational, and housing on ownership levels. Starting with factor analysis to categorise appliances by their latent characteristics, we then apply the bivariate ordered probit model to identify drivers of consumption among the urban households. We find that while income and household demographics are predominant drivers of car and appliance uptake, the household's perception of status, instrumented by a variable measuring expenditure on conspicuous consumption, emerges as a key social dimension influencing the uptake. The results indicate how households identify themselves in society influences their corresponding car and appliance consumption. A deeper understanding of status-based consumption is, therefore, essential to designing better demand-side solutions to low carbon consumption. KW - Residential energy demand KW - Perceived socioeconomic status KW - Social KW - drivers KW - Energy policy KW - Car ownership KW - Appliance diffusion Y1 - 2020 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2020.101742 SN - 2214-6296 SN - 2214-6326 VL - 70 PB - Elsevier CY - Amsterdam ER -