Social Network Sites (SNSs) are increasingly influencing the academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and settings. Although SNS has been claimed that it occupied too much of peoples’ daily lives by many researchers and scientists, the fact also demonstrates the growing use of SNS in education area, which proved that SNS has its unique pedagogical significance and potential to foster students’ learning experience. Used and promoted in many countries around the world, SNS is now not only serving as a social network environment (SNE) for people to communicate, but also a platform for academic information exchange and sharing in various contexts. This study aimed at exploring the differences between western and Chinese localised SNS, evaluating the practicability of SNS use in China’s education, and identifying certain problems in the implementation. Referenced by the literature on SNS experiment in teaching, cultural influence and pedagogy value, Chinese SNS would be analysed from comprehensive perspectives. This study combined two parts, one was the comparison study for four selected SNSs from China and foreign countries, the other was the research experiment conducted with a class of 17 students enrolling in an English educational institution in Chinese mainland, where the students took a spoken English course which lasted for one and a half month. The selected SNSs used in the experiment were implemented to facilitate the teaching and support designed learning process that requires students to explore the use of SNS and motivate them to interact more with peers and teacher off-class while completing the course objectives. Date collection and analysis conducted mixed methods in this research, the data of this research were collected by different levels of participants’ interviews, observations, recordings and questionnaires that covers the perceptions for research topic, everyday use of SNSs, taken-forgranted interactions and communication among teacher and students in the learning and teaching process. This research not only justify the practicability of SNS use in China’s education, it also revealed various functions that SNSs could provide in China’s education. In terms of functionality, it could serves as a platform for (a) facilitating presentation and demonstration, (b) developing personal learning record and portfolios, (c) distributing and sharing resources, (d) promoting student-teacher offline interaction, (e) enabling free comment and feedbacks. Theoretical research would be conducted and practical implementation would also be introduced. Through the experiment, the research would make the best of SNSs in education, which further discuss the special characteristics of Chinese localised SNSs and broaden the understanding of using SNS in education. Pedagogical principles are also discussed. / published_or_final_version / Education / Master / Master of Education

published_or_final_version / Journalism and Media Studies Centre / Master / Master of Philosophy

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of Communication

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of Communication

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of Communication

Chen Yun. / Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-100). / Abstracts in English and Chinese; appendix in Chinese. / Chapter Chapter 1 --- Prologue --- p.1 / Chapter Chapter 2： --- "Internet, J-blog, and the Public Sphere..…" --- p.4 / Chapter 2.1. --- The Public Sphere： from West to East --- p.4 / Chapter 2.2. --- Internet and the Public Sphere --- p.8 / Chapter 2.3. --- A Brief History of blog and its Development in China --- p.11 / Chapter 2.4. --- Blogs and the Public Sphere --- p.14 / Chapter 2.5. --- Blogs and Journalism --- p.18 / Chapter 2.6. --- Media and Journalism in China --- p.22 / Chapter 2.7. --- Identity and Public Sphere --- p.26 / Chapter Chapter 3： --- Research Question and Research Methods --- p.30 / Chapter 3.1. --- Research Scope and the Selected Sample --- p.30 / Chapter 3.2. --- A Single Case Study of Anti blog --- p.31 / Chapter 3.3. --- Research Questions: --- p.35 / Chapter 3.4. --- Qualitative methods： --- p.37 / Chapter 3.5. --- Quantitative method： --- p.39 / Chapter Chapter 4： --- Findings --- p.40 / Chapter 4.1 --- Anti blog as alternative public sphere --- p.40 / Chapter 4.2 --- Identity and authority construction of Anti blog --- p.66 / Chapter 4.3. --- The Personalization of j-blog： empowerment and its discontent --- p.76 / Chapter Chapter 5 --- "Discussion： Internet, public sphere and identity construction" --- p.78 / Appendix --- p.90 / Bibliography --- p.92

Recent years witnessed incredibly increasing popularity of online social networking sites around the globe. The emergence of new social media, including online social networking sites, brings the communication world a brand-new area to explore. The success of Facebook and MySpace in the U.S. has attracted a considerate number of communication scholars to examine this phenomenon from different perspectives. As the most cutting-edge tool to investigate a newly-grown medium, uses and gratifications perspective focuses on why people use social media, and how people use them to satisfy their needs. In this study, the most popular online social networking site in China, Renren, was selected to investigate the uses and gratifications of Chinese college students. Four motivations, that is, socializing, entertainment, self-status seeking, and information seeking, were utilized to measure how much weight Chinese college students give to each motivation. Culture's impact on the usage of online social networking sites was also investigated. The concept of interdependent self-construal and independent self-construal was borrowed to examine how culture could play a role in SNS use among Chinese college students. The study found Chinese college students use SNS to gratify their needs of socializing, entertainment, information seeking, while self-status seeking seems to be a weaker factor of SNS use. Six themes emerged in the study including: 1) vision and outlook expansion, 2) friendship maintenance, 3) a sense of self-worth, 4) information seeking, 5) entertainment, and 6) cultivated as a habit, to pass time. In addition, Chinese college students seem to have independent self-construal rather than interdependent self-construal, but the tendency is weak and self-report statistics show they tend to give moderate answers regarding to the self-construal. The influence of different self-construals towards motives in using Renren is subtle. Further explanations of observed finding were provided in the thesis.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences. / Department of Communication

Huang, Hanyun. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-242). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstract also in Chinese; appendix in Chinese.

By making use of the virtual community, older netizens can accumulate and maintain their social capital in various ways: namely, improving their self-identities through online collective problem-solving; developing collective identification with the community through sharing collective memories with their peers online; exchanging intellectual capital for social resources offline during their social engagement; providing emotional support to their net friends; and increasing the density of their networks of social relationships through interacting with their net friends both online and offline. / Data collection is mainly based on ethnographic work, including online and offline participant observation between September 2008 and July 2009. The data collection was later supplemented with semi-structured in-depth interview (on 37 OldKids members) and textual analysis. When analyzing how the virtual community interacts with older netizens' social capital, the study introduces a theoretical framework that, illustrates the acquisition of social capital on its cognitive, behavioral, structural and relational dimensions. / Existing literature reveals that netizens augment their social capital upon joining social networking sites. But most studies focus on analyzing youth behaviors, neglecting older adults, who are often labeled as laggards in taking up new technologies. Because social capita is a resource which can be mobilized to provide network-mediated benefits beyond the immediate family; it is especially important for disadvantaged groups (i.e. older generation) who lack social support. In Chinese society, older adults' social capital shrinks dramatically after their retirement; therefore it is of practical significance for this study to explore how virtual communities provide older people with opportunities to regain and enhance social capital. / This study also reveals that the online roles and social status of the older netizens, together with the external social context of OldKids website, influence how the virtual community influence social capital. In other words, social capital does not distribute evenly among virtual community members. The netizen who takes on more active and responsible roles can accrue more social capital than other members. / This study reveals that OldKids virtual community and its offline communities (OldKids club and OldKids salons) act as platforms and at the same time are driving forces for the older netizens to develop their social capital: it provides them access to cyberspace through encouraging knowledge sharing online and designing offline computer training for the elderly; it encourages its members to shape collective memory through organizing ritual-like online and offline activities; it facilitates members' social engagements by obtaining resources from local government and traditional media; finally, it promotes the flow and exchange of members' social capital resources between online and offline communities. / Under the background of worldwide aged tendency of population, this thesis explores how virtual communities provide social resources to disadvantaged groups. Using the OldKids website (headquartered in Shanghai, China) as a case study, the research investigates how this virtual community assists its members to mobilize social capital, a valuable productive resource inheres in social relations. / 吳歡. / Adviser: Anthony Y. H. Fung. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 73-01, Section: A, page: . / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2010. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 287-301). / Electronic reproduction. Hong Kong : Chinese University of Hong Kong, [2012] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Electronic reproduction. [Ann Arbor, MI] : ProQuest Information and Learning, [201-] System requirements: Adobe Acrobat Reader. Available via World Wide Web. / Abstracts in Chinese and English, partial text includes English translation. / Wu Huan.