Reflection plays an important role in the learning process. A good learning strategy is supposed to improve a learner¡¦s reflection level.The Prompts is one of the learning strategies to promote a learner¡¦s reflection level. As a result, a well-formed prompt strategy fitting what a learner has or is situated in the right context will be the key factor contributing to promote a learner¡¦s reflection level. This study applied the prompts strategy in a Microblogging environment and named it as ¡§Microblogging Prompts Strategy¡¨. It¡¦s expected that designed microblogging prompts strategy would have positive effects on a learner¡¦s reflection level, metacognition and learning performance. The results show that microblogging prompts strategy has significantly positive effects on a learner¡¦s reflection level and metacognition but no positive effects on learner¡¦s learning performance. In addition to this, this study further investigates the learner¡¦s usage attitude and feedback toward the microblogging prompts steategy. Finally, the learners accessing microblogging prompts system by mobile devices were interviewed in order to investigate the potential issues and prombles of this strategy in the mobile learning environment.

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This study focuses on the potential contribution of new information communication technologies in higher education, in particular the use of microblogging, in transforming teaching practices to enhance critical thinking skills. Recognising the dearth of critical thinking skills in higher education and its importance in the cultivation of an engaged citizenry which is necessary for the creation of a vibrant and thriving democracy, the study seeks to investigate teaching practices in the higher education sector, utilizing the Community of Inquiry model to examine the possible iterative dialogues between lecturer and students in a first year class , in the form of microblogging posts , for evidence of potential critical engagement. In its finding , the study, whilst not being able to demonstrate significant evidence of higher order thinking, ascribed to the use of the of the microblogging activity , does however support the notion that the microblogging platform offers the potential for critical engagement but emphasizes that this potential , is to a very large degree, dependent on the adoption of appropriate and sound pedagogical strategies .

In China, an increasing number of individuals and companies are adopting microblogging, a popular form of social media, in order to connect and interact with other people, and recent online events indicate the power of microblogging in Chinese society. Holding the belief that microblogging brings out the interactive nature of new media as well as the audiences, many companies are exploring microblogging in order to better communicate with their audiences. However, very little is known about how those brands use microblogging to promote themselves and what the audiences’ preferences are on this platform. Employing uses and gratifications and feminism theories, this study examined how fashion brands use Weibo.com, one of the main microblogging platforms in China, to promote themselves and what the Chinese women, the main audience of both Weibo.com and fashion brands, ask for from fashion brands’ tweets. The quantitative content analysis of the tweets of three major fashion brands, namely Burberry, Louis Vuitton, and Bvlgari, shows the general pattern of how microblogging are being deployed. A further investigation was conducted through ethnographic content analysis in order to examine the implicit values conveyed by fashion brand’s tweets and the audiences’ preferences towards these values. Results from the analyses revealed that the prevailing topics covered in the fashion brands’ tweets included their products, related celebrities, and the brands’ events or projects, and fashion brands usually combined several topics in one tweet in order to provide more information to the audiences. Taken a deeper look at the latent message of the tweets, fashion appears to play a positive role in emancipating contemporary Chinese women.

The history of consumerism shows that consumer movements in developed countries with capitalist economies in general, and in the United States in particular, have had great success in helping customers get safer products (car seat belts), more information (product labels), and better market regulation (the Consumer Product Safety Act). Consumer interests in developed countries are represented by several sets of organizations with different concerns. These consumer interests are fragmented but well articulated, whereas in developing countries, consumer interests are homogeneous and unarticulated. Moreover, compared with the hyper-connected world we live in today, in the past greater efforts were required to mobilize consumers for consumerism actions such as protests, boycotts, calls for policy change, and demands for more government regulations. The purpose of this study is to develop a testable model of consumerism, with a focus on market settings within a developed country, the United States, and a developing country, Saudi Arabia. The goals are to (a) understand why some consumers go beyond the norm to engage in consumerism behaviors, and (b) whether their level of consumerism differs between that of a developed and a developing country, and if so, why. To this end, a consumerism model based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) was developed. The research provides the first set of data and the first quantitative analysis regarding consumerism behaviors in conjunction with the use of an online platform (Twitter) among Saudi Arabian and American consumers. The developed model explained consumerism behaviors. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that the Saudi sample had a higher level of intent to engage in consumerism behaviors than did the American sample. Also, this study shows that the Saudi sample had a negative perception of government regulatory practices and a higher level of intent to engage in consumerism behaviors on Twitter than the American sample. Thus, in Saudi Arabia, a country with a restricted civil society and only one semi-independent consumer protection organization, more consumers use Twitter as a consumerism platform than in the US, a country with an unrestricted civil society and numerous independent consumer organizations.

This study explores the extent to which news media agendas relate to each other in a microblogging environment, how the Obama administration's agenda relates to them in this realm, and how these agendas align with the public's list of top policy issues in the real world. A content analysis of more than 4,600 tweets from six accounts in 2013 were ranked and compared to a list of 20 public policy priorities. Findings support previous research that found a significant relationship among traditional media agendas in print. Measures of association between news media and administration agendas show some consistency and some discrepancy. This study did not find as significant a correlation between news media and administration agendas and the public's list of top priorities. These findings suggest a substantial disconnect in Twitter between news coverage and federal-level political leadership focus in relation to the issues that matter most to citizens of the United States.

abstract: Microblogging services such as Twitter, Sina Weibo, and Tumblr have been emerging and deeply embedded into people's daily lives. Used by hundreds of millions of users to connect the people worldwide and share and access information in real-time, the microblogging service has also became the target of malicious attackers due to its massive user engagement and structural openness. Although existed, little is still known in the community about new types of vulnerabilities in current microblogging services which could be leveraged by the intelligence-evolving attackers, and more importantly, the corresponding defenses that could prevent both the users and the microblogging service providers from being attacked. This dissertation aims to uncover a number of challenging security and privacy issues in microblogging services and also propose corresponding defenses. This dissertation makes fivefold contributions. The first part presents the social botnet, a group of collaborative social bots under the control of a single botmaster, demonstrate the effectiveness and advantages of exploiting a social botnet for spam distribution and digital-influence manipulation, and propose the corresponding countermeasures and evaluate their effectiveness. Inspired by Pagerank, the second part describes TrueTop, the first sybil-resilient system to find the top-K influential users in microblogging services with very accurate results and strong resilience to sybil attacks. TrueTop has been implemented to handle millions of nodes and 100 times more edges on commodity computers. The third and fourth part demonstrate that microblogging systems' structural openness and users' carelessness could disclose the later's sensitive information such as home city and age. LocInfer, a novel and lightweight system, is presented to uncover the majority of the users in any metropolitan area; the dissertation also proposes MAIF, a novel machine learning framework that leverages public content and interaction information in microblogging services to infer users' hidden ages. Finally, the dissertation proposes the first privacy-preserving social media publishing framework to let the microblogging service providers publish their data to any third-party without disclosing users' privacy and meanwhile meeting the data's commercial utilities. This dissertation sheds the light on the state-of-the-art security and privacy issues in the microblogging services. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 2016

This thesis aims to research hashtags on Instagram via the semiotics analysis. The research is based on Leoš Mareš's Instagram profile, which is one of the most successful accounts within the Czech environment, and uses specific types of hashtags. Therefore, it provides a quality data corpus for the research. At the beginning of the thesis the subject of semiotics is introduced, also other key terms, such as meaning, sign, semantics, pragmatics, and syntactic, denotation and connotation, and language tropes. Following there is an introduction of the new media, Instagram, and hashtags. Hashtags are described within the Twitter background, since most of the studies are focused on hashtags on Twitter. The practical part of this thesis is based on Morris's division of semiotics, which is syntactic, semantics, and pragmatics. It studies how hashtags follow and refer to each other, what is the relationship between the photograph and hashtags, and what are the assumptions for understanding the whole post. At the end of the thesis the findings are summarized, and the patterns of hashtags' occurrence are shown.

In China, an increasing number of individuals and companies are adopting microblogging, a popular form of social media, in order to connect and interact with other people, and recent online events indicate the power of microblogging in Chinese society. Holding the belief that microblogging brings out the interactive nature of new media as well as the audiences, many companies are exploring microblogging in order to better communicate with their audiences. However, very little is known about how those brands use microblogging to promote themselves and what the audiences’ preferences are on this platform. Employing uses and gratifications and feminism theories, this study examined how fashion brands use Weibo.com, one of the main microblogging platforms in China, to promote themselves and what the Chinese women, the main audience of both Weibo.com and fashion brands, ask for from fashion brands’ tweets. The quantitative content analysis of the tweets of three major fashion brands, namely Burberry, Louis Vuitton, and Bvlgari, shows the general pattern of how microblogging are being deployed. A further investigation was conducted through ethnographic content analysis in order to examine the implicit values conveyed by fashion brand’s tweets and the audiences’ preferences towards these values. Results from the analyses revealed that the prevailing topics covered in the fashion brands’ tweets included their products, related celebrities, and the brands’ events or projects, and fashion brands usually combined several topics in one tweet in order to provide more information to the audiences. Taken a deeper look at the latent message of the tweets, fashion appears to play a positive role in emancipating contemporary Chinese women.

Most of the research done on microblogging services, such as Twitter, has focused on how the individual communicates with their community at a micro and macro level; less research has been done on how the community affects the individual. We present in this thesis some ideas about this phenomenon. We do this by collecting data of Twitter users at a conference. We collected 21,150 tweets from approximately 400 users during a five week period and additionally collected survey data from a small subset of the tweeters. By observing users of Twitter, before, during, after a specific event we discovered a pattern in postings. Specifically, we found that tweets increased the week of the conference and that by the end of the conference the network was strong. These findings lead us to conclude that collocation of communities, like conferences, has a substantial effect on online microblogging behaviors. / Master of Science