From The Sunday Times
April 12, 2009
Facebook fans do worse in exams
Research finds the website is damaging students’ academic performance
FACEBOOK users may feel socially successful in cyberspace but they are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research into the academic impact of the social networking website.
The majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.
Researchers have discovered how students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and “poking” others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work.
The findings will confirm the worst fears of parents and teachers. They follow the ban on social networking websites in many offices, imposed to prevent workers from wasting time.
About 83% of British 16 to 24-year-olds are thought to use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, to keep in touch with friends and organise their social lives.
“Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying,” said Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University. “Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon.”
Karpinski and a colleague questioned 219 US undergraduates and graduates about their study practices and general internet use, as well as their specific use of Facebook.
They found that 65% of Facebook users accessed their account daily, usually checking it several times to see if they had received new messages. The amount of time spent on Facebook at each log-in varied from just a few minutes to more than an hour.
The Ohio report shows that students who used Facebook had a “significantly” lower grade point average - the marking system used in US universities - than those who did not use the site.
“It is the equivalent of the difference between getting an A and a B,” said Karpinski, who will present her findings this week to the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association.
She has not yet analysed whether a student’s grades continue to deteriorate the longer he or she spends on Facebook.
Some UK students have already spotted the potential danger. Daisy Jones, 21, an undergraduate in her final year at Loughborough University, realised the time she was spending on Facebook was threatening her grades - prompting her to deactivate her account.
“I was in the library trying to write a 2,000-word essay when I realised my Facebook habit had got out of hand,” she said.
“I couldn’t resist going online. You do that, then someone’s photo catches your eye. Before you know it, a couple of minutes has turned into a couple of hours and you haven’t written a thing.” Jones is among the few to have recognised the risks. According to Karpinski’s research, 79% of Facebook-using students believed the time they spent on the site had no impact on their work.
Facebook said: “There is also academic research that shows the benefits of services like Facebook. It’s in the hands of students, in consultation with their parents, to decide how to spend their time.”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article6078321.ece
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Does Facebook Hurt Your Grades?
Read more!
Friday, August 8, 2008
How to keep your private moments off Facebook
Read more!
SUNDAY afternoon used to mean lazing on the quad or sleeping off a hangover. No one could remember much about what happened the night before.
Now there’s a new ritual: reviewing Saturday night’s escapades. By nap time, party photographs are already posted on Facebook.com. Not surprisingly, they may reveal a little too much. Even more mortifying, they’ve likely been tagged — the individuals featured in the photos identified. The captioned images can be easily discovered by anyone on the photographer’s “friends” list, by friends of those tagged and even by entire city networks, depending on the users’ privacy settings.
Matt Jackson, a junior at the University of Washington, remembers waking up to half a dozen tagged photos the day after a party. “We’d all been drinking a little bit,” he says. “Well, not just a little bit.”
What’s a student on the job market to do? De-tag. Now.
De-tagging — removing your name from a Facebook photo — has become an image-saving step in the college party cycle. “The event happens, pictures are up within 12 hours, and within another 12 hours people are de-tagging,” says Chris Pund, a senior at Radford University in Virginia.
Campaigns to educate students about the pitfalls of Facebook — how professors, parents and prospective employers can use the social networking site to uncover information once considered private — have become a staple of freshman orientation sessions and career center clinics. Students are apparently listening.
“If I’m holding something I shouldn’t be holding, I’ll untag,” says Robyn Backer, a junior at Virginia Wesleyan College. She recalls how her high school principal saw online photos of partying students and suspended the athletes who were holding beer bottles but not those with red plastic cups. “And if I’m making a particularly ugly face, I’ll untag myself. Anything really embarrassing, I’ll untag.”
When it emerged in 2004, Facebook was open only to collegians at a handful of institutions. Today, it is available to anyone with a verifiable e-mail address and has 80 million active users. Default settings let any user view pictures, and tagged photos become part of your profile, open to your friends list and chosen network. Facebook has been hammered over privacy issues, and responded in March with new tools. Now settings are easier to reconfigure, and access can be customized to subsets of friends - school friends, work friends, beach-party friends - keeping others away from photos.
Still, students have Facebook friends they don’t know very well; even using restraint, friends lists grow large. As Ms. Backer reports, “I have no more than 200 friends on Facebook. I’m kind of picky.”
Despite the privacy concerns, Facebook hasn’t reined in its tagging application. According to comScore, Facebook has the No. 1 photo service on the Web — thanks in part to the tagging feature, says Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer. Students say it is easy to use and a convenient way to exchange and track pictures from friends. The tradeoff is you can’t pre-empt anyone from tagging your image. And because many Facebook users log in a dozen times a day, you have to act fast to disassociate yourself from a photo.
Jaclyn Mautone, a senior at Fairfield University in Connecticut, realized how embarrassing tags could be as she flipped through photos from spring break: “I’m like, ‘Oh, thank God that’s not me.’ Everyone is in bathing suits, but they haven’t had a chance to untag the photos yet.” Ms. Mautone advises against adding beach-party acquaintances to friends lists. “Maybe they are not even your friends, and they suddenly have this power to tag you.”
Jim Saksa, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the student newspaper recently about how in the main library one day he noticed a girl looking at pictures of him. He didn’t know her, but she apparently had access to a friend’s photo album. The experience, he says, brought home the idea that his image was out there, out of his control.
“Our generation is the first to cope with the necessary assumption that our every action seen by another may in turn be seen by all of our peers,” he wrote.
Part of the privacy gap comes from the ubiquity of digital cameras. Today’s students whip out tiny cameras or photo-capable cellphones at any occasion. “While people are taking photos, they will say, ‘Oh, you’re going to see this on Facebook!’ ” says Mr. Jackson of the University of Washington. Asking someone to remove a photo is just not part of Facebook culture.
While students say they see more caution in what’s being posted, seniors especially are tightening privacy controls. Early data from a study by Educause shows that 45 percent of students who use social-networking sites put “a lot” of restrictions on who can see their profile; 41 percent put “some.” Others are concerned enough to deactivate their accounts altogether.
Joel Carle, an education graduate student at the State University of New York, Fredonia, did so when he started hunting for teaching jobs, “just to be safe.”
Ms. Mautone has limited her photo album to friends only. She de-tags often. And she is using Facebook’s new privacy tool that lets her exclude a specific friend or group of friends from seeing photos she is tagged in — like the supervisor from her internship who “friended” her but is many years her senior. In short, her strategy is vigilance. “Stay on top of it,” she says, “and make sure you know who can see what.”
Lisa Guersney is the author of “Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children From Birth to Age 5.”
De-tag or you’re it. How to keep your private moments off Facebook.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUNDAY afternoon used to mean lazing on the quad or sleeping off a hangover. No one could remember much about what happened the night before.
Now there’s a new ritual: reviewing Saturday night’s escapades. By nap time, party photographs are already posted on Facebook.com. Not surprisingly, they may reveal a little too much. Even more mortifying, they’ve likely been tagged — the individuals featured in the photos identified. The captioned images can be easily discovered by anyone on the photographer’s “friends” list, by friends of those tagged and even by entire city networks, depending on the users’ privacy settings.
Matt Jackson, a junior at the University of Washington, remembers waking up to half a dozen tagged photos the day after a party. “We’d all been drinking a little bit,” he says. “Well, not just a little bit.”
What’s a student on the job market to do? De-tag. Now.
De-tagging — removing your name from a Facebook photo — has become an image-saving step in the college party cycle. “The event happens, pictures are up within 12 hours, and within another 12 hours people are de-tagging,” says Chris Pund, a senior at Radford University in Virginia.
Campaigns to educate students about the pitfalls of Facebook — how professors, parents and prospective employers can use the social networking site to uncover information once considered private — have become a staple of freshman orientation sessions and career center clinics. Students are apparently listening.
“If I’m holding something I shouldn’t be holding, I’ll untag,” says Robyn Backer, a junior at Virginia Wesleyan College. She recalls how her high school principal saw online photos of partying students and suspended the athletes who were holding beer bottles but not those with red plastic cups. “And if I’m making a particularly ugly face, I’ll untag myself. Anything really embarrassing, I’ll untag.”
When it emerged in 2004, Facebook was open only to collegians at a handful of institutions. Today, it is available to anyone with a verifiable e-mail address and has 80 million active users. Default settings let any user view pictures, and tagged photos become part of your profile, open to your friends list and chosen network. Facebook has been hammered over privacy issues, and responded in March with new tools. Now settings are easier to reconfigure, and access can be customized to subsets of friends - school friends, work friends, beach-party friends - keeping others away from photos.
Still, students have Facebook friends they don’t know very well; even using restraint, friends lists grow large. As Ms. Backer reports, “I have no more than 200 friends on Facebook. I’m kind of picky.”
Despite the privacy concerns, Facebook hasn’t reined in its tagging application. According to comScore, Facebook has the No. 1 photo service on the Web — thanks in part to the tagging feature, says Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer. Students say it is easy to use and a convenient way to exchange and track pictures from friends. The tradeoff is you can’t pre-empt anyone from tagging your image. And because many Facebook users log in a dozen times a day, you have to act fast to disassociate yourself from a photo.
Jaclyn Mautone, a senior at Fairfield University in Connecticut, realized how embarrassing tags could be as she flipped through photos from spring break: “I’m like, ‘Oh, thank God that’s not me.’ Everyone is in bathing suits, but they haven’t had a chance to untag the photos yet.” Ms. Mautone advises against adding beach-party acquaintances to friends lists. “Maybe they are not even your friends, and they suddenly have this power to tag you.”
Jim Saksa, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the student newspaper recently about how in the main library one day he noticed a girl looking at pictures of him. He didn’t know her, but she apparently had access to a friend’s photo album. The experience, he says, brought home the idea that his image was out there, out of his control.
“Our generation is the first to cope with the necessary assumption that our every action seen by another may in turn be seen by all of our peers,” he wrote.
Part of the privacy gap comes from the ubiquity of digital cameras. Today’s students whip out tiny cameras or photo-capable cellphones at any occasion. “While people are taking photos, they will say, ‘Oh, you’re going to see this on Facebook!’ ” says Mr. Jackson of the University of Washington. Asking someone to remove a photo is just not part of Facebook culture.
While students say they see more caution in what’s being posted, seniors especially are tightening privacy controls. Early data from a study by Educause shows that 45 percent of students who use social-networking sites put “a lot” of restrictions on who can see their profile; 41 percent put “some.” Others are concerned enough to deactivate their accounts altogether.
Joel Carle, an education graduate student at the State University of New York, Fredonia, did so when he started hunting for teaching jobs, “just to be safe.”
Ms. Mautone has limited her photo album to friends only. She de-tags often. And she is using Facebook’s new privacy tool that lets her exclude a specific friend or group of friends from seeing photos she is tagged in — like the supervisor from her internship who “friended” her but is many years her senior. In short, her strategy is vigilance. “Stay on top of it,” she says, “and make sure you know who can see what.”
Lisa Guersney is the author of “Into the Minds of Babes: How Screen Time Affects Children From Birth to Age 5.”
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Staying Private on Facebook
Read more!
Q & A
Q. How much information from my Facebook profile can random people find out about me with a regular Web search?
A. Facebook announced last fall that it was making limited member profiles visible on the Web for people who are not members of the social networking site. While the information revealed about you is limited to your name and profile photo, you can edit your privacy settings to limit what the general public — as well as Facebook members — can see.
To adjust your privacy preferences, log into your Facebook account and click the Privacy link in the top right corner of your home page. On the Privacy Overview page, you will find links to the aspects of your Facebook profile that you can control. For example, click the Search link to limit which Facebook users can find you in a search — everyone, people in your network or just the users you have tagged as friends.
You can also choose on this page whether to let people outside Facebook see your information. Make sure the box for your “public search listing” is not checked if you don’t want to be found by search engines. If you want to be found, you can specify here what people can see or do if they find you, like viewing your photo.
Aside from your search privacy settings, the Privacy Overview page has plenty of other options to adjust if you want to limit what people, Facebook applications or even external Web sites can display on your profile page. You can also choose to block or limit your profile to specific users.
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