Creating the intercultural learning narrative using social network sites status updates: An innovative approach in using social media Jason Wen Yau Lee*, Beaumie Kim, Mi Song Kim National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore *
[email protected] Abstract: The growing use of the social media phenomenon is synonymous with words such as Facebook, Twitter, Web 2.0 and blogging. Teenagers today embraced social media through their active use of multiple social network sites and what makes social media social and attractive to users is that users are encouraged to share as much information as possible with other peers on the site. This growing trend in the use of social media opens up a possibility for researchers to harness information from this media. In this paper, we described how we used the status updates from an exchange student during his time abroad to create a narrative of his experience aboard.
1.0 Introduction In recent years, there has been a push by the software industry as a whole in the development of social software that has enabled people to express themselves freely and collaboratively. This has caused the use of social media applications to steadily increase over the past years, coupled with the increasing number of such applications developed and pushed across the Internet. Even major news portals such as CNN and the BBC have integrated social media applications into their site. For example, readers of such sites are able to easily share any news articles that they find interesting on their social bookmarks such as Delicious, StumbleUpon and Facebook; or they can leave comments on the articles that others can see. Humans are essentially social beings and technology has enabled these social applications to be integrated into our daily lives. It is quite inconceivable that the average urban teenagers today in developed nations not have some form of their social presence publically viewable online. With this growing trend of the usage of social media, it is very likely that teenagers will be actively using these social media in their daily lives. The amount of time spent by teenagers on social network sites has been steadily increasing over the past few years (Lenhart, Purcell, Smith, & Zickuhr, 2010) and it is not surprising that there is a wealth of information being posted on their daily lives in these sites. Due to the informal nature of these sites, a person is likely to be feeling more free and more comfortable with expressing him or herself as compared with a more formal environment such as interviews, field observation or to an extent, journal writing. In this paper, we described how we use the status updates to create the intercultural learning story of a participant on an intercultural exchange program. Traditionally, researchers wanting to understand the intercultural learning experience of participants on exchange programs used blogs, journal writing, surveys, and interviews (e.g., Cushner & Karim, 2003; Hansel, 2008; Koskinen & Tossavainen, 2004; O'Neill, 2008). In this paper, we propose a more naturalistic digital ethnography approach in trying to understand the learning experience. This is achieved by using a collection of status update over the period of intercultural exchange abroad and we created a narrative of the experience using these status updates.
2.0 Situating the study Ethnography Ethnography is a study where the researcher goes to the field and returns to report their stories. Essentially, the ethnographic approach study people in everyday setting with attention to the participant’s meaning-making process (Anderson-Levitt, 2006). People make meanings and learn by interacting with others, interpret their experience, and generate behaviors based on what they learn (Spradley, 1980). This means that our ways of behaving are acquired through social interactions and may change according to the situations and people that we encounter. This shared culture of how to interact with each other in a community is what ethnographers are interested in their studies.
Lee, J.W.Y., Kim, B. & Kim, M.S. (2011). Creating the intercultural learning narrative using social network sites status updates: An innovative approach in using social media. In S. Barton et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Global Learn Asia Pacific 2011 (pp. 1819-1826). AACE.
As we move into the digital age, researchers have begun to leverage on social network technologies in their research methods (e.g., Ellison, Steinfield, & Lampe, 2007; Lee, Kim, & Kim, 2010; Mazer, Murphy, & Simonds, 2007; Raja Hussain & Ng, 2010). Despite this change, the epistemology underpinning digital ethnography remains the same, which is to understand the behavior of people but in a digital environment. With the availability of new media, ethnographers can leverage the use of these technologies as avenues for understanding the meaning making process of study participants. Blogs, online questionnaires, forums and social networking can be thought as digital spaces where people can mingle around and hang out in a virtual environment. With these technologies, ethnography has gone digital, which changes how the participants are observed in this borderless environment. Social media for research Figure 1 is a compilation of social media technologies that are popularly used today. These technologies are plotted along the asynchronous-synchronous technologies vs. private-public space. Synchronous technologies allows for real time communication such as instant messaging while asynchronous communication does not occur in real time such as forums or emails. We further divided these technologies to public space and private space. Technologies that are classified to be in the public space can be viewed by everyone while those in the private space are restricted to those privy to the information. For example, blogs can be both public and private depending on the privacy level set by the user. SNSs provide an interesting case as it contains both asynchronous (e.g., wall message, private message) and synchronous communication (Facebook chat) functions within the site. With the privacy control afforded in most SNS, users can choose to have the information within their profile be public or restricted to friends but a direct connection to friends is required in order to have full access to a person’s social network profile.
Public Public blogs Forums Wikis Twitter
Chat rooms Multi-way chats
Asynchronous
Synchronous Social network sites
E Mails Mailing list Private blogs
Instant messaging
Private Figure 1. Social media in the public-private and synchronous-asynchronous dimensions. (Adapted from Hernández-Ramos, 2004) The term social media has come to encompass a wide variety of applications such as blogs, wikis, Twitter, and social network sites. Although these technologies had humble beginnings once mainly accessible only to the Lee, J.W.Y., Kim, B. & Kim, M.S. (2011). Creating the intercultural learning narrative using social network sites status updates: An innovative approach in using social media. In S. Barton et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Global Learn Asia Pacific 2011 (pp. 1819-1826). AACE.
technologically savvy, it has now become widely available to the mass. Blogs are perhaps one of the oldest technologies that have evolved to become part of the social media. It is social as readers are able to leave comments or receive feedback from their readers and able to interact in an asynchronous manner. Blogs are also been used by researchers (e.g., Hernández-Ramos, 2004; Lin & Yuan, 2006) as a source of insights into student reflection during the learning process. However, as we move towards a more instantaneous world, the use of technologies that allows for quick access to information has become increasingly popular. While blogs were useful for one to write down some reflective thoughts, microblogging allows for a person to quickly broadcast what he thinks in a short sentence burst. Microblogging is a form of asynchronous communication that has gained popularity to broadcast ideas, thoughts and even as a marketing tool for companies where these short messages are archived on a microblogging site similar to how blogs are archived. What distinguishes these microblogs from blogs are the amount of words able to be published, typically under 500 characters thus requiring the users to be concise with their postings. Among the popular microblog services are Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku, and Sixapart but these features are not limited exclusively to these microblogging sites. Social network sites also have their own built in microblog services, such as status updates in Facebook that can seamlessly connect with each other through certain protocols. A user only needs to update one of these services and the content can be aggregated over multiple services. Although blogs and microblogs provide an avenue for people to express their feelings and thoughts, they do not provide the ability for people to easily connect with each other as microblogs are developed mainly to publish content. In parallel to the increasing popularity of microblogs, social network sites began to develop as an avenue for people to connect with each other. One of the earliest popular SNS was MySpace whose helm is now taken over by Facebook. For active users of such SNS, a considerable amount of time would have gone into the content creation process of their profile page, which is an extension of the user’s online social presence. The vast amount of information that is being posted on the user’s SNS page creates the possibility to give an understanding into what the person is experiencing in their life. For researchers, the term social network site has been gaining much attention. There has been also a steady and growing empirical research being published to investigate the use of social network sites (e.g., boyd & Ellison, 2008; Lee, et al., 2010; Raja Hussain & Ng, 2010; Zywica & Danowski, 2008). However, it was not until the early 2000s when Web 2.0 technologies (O'Reilly, 2005) such as AJAX and other lightweight programming languages that powered SNS has reached maturity to enable the growth of SNS as we know today. While the journal writing process is often a private affair, a more recent alternative is to use blogs as tools for reflective writing (Jonassen, 2008). Blogs are a collection of entries of commentary written by individuals or groups of individuals and displayed in reverse chronological order. It gained mainstream popularity as a way for people to express their views and thoughts online. Blogs have shown to be useful in motivating students to actively reflect on their learning experiences and expressed positive responses to their learning experience (Lin & Yuan, 2006). Park (2003) called blogs as a successor to the learning journal as it serves as a vehicle for individual reflection. While blogs seems to be a promising avenue for students to reflect on their experiences, Hall and Davison (2007) cautioned that some students may not be as enthusiastic or encouraged when using blogs to reflect on their experiences.
3.0 Using SNS to create the intercultural story We center the discussion of this paper on a popular SNS called Facebook. Facebook is one of the most popular SNS which has over 500 million users are logged in on a daily basis with a total of 700 billion minutes spent per month on Facebook (Facebook, 2010). The term “friend” is loosely defined on SNS. In a SNS, friends are people whom one share a virtual social connection. For example, family members, acquaintances, co-workers or even strangers can be considered as friends on SNS. To make adding friends easier, one of the features within Facebook is the system would “suggest” friends to users based on mutual friends that they share. However, adding friends on Facebook is a bi-directional process where confirmation is required in order for such a social connection to be built. Once another user has been approved as a friend, they will have more access to information that would otherwise be restricted. 3.1 Facebook Status Updates Lee, J.W.Y., Kim, B. & Kim, M.S. (2011). Creating the intercultural learning narrative using social network sites status updates: An innovative approach in using social media. In S. Barton et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Global Learn Asia Pacific 2011 (pp. 1819-1826). AACE.
Status update is a feature within Facebook that lets users post short messages of up to 420 characters. Status updates are essentially a short shout-out or emotional expression that a person wishes to share with friends. On Facebook, users are encouraged to post their current status where prompted by the question “What’s on your mind?” when they log into their Facebook page. When a status update is posted, it is “published” and appears on the user’s wall and on his friends’ news feed, which is the main landing page upon login to Facebook . Friends can also leave comments on the status updates. These status updates and corresponding comment are archived with a timestamp and respondent’s name, thus providing researchers an insight on the interaction that has taken place within this space. These postings within the SNS are the digital equivalent of a short conversation between friends. Unlike an asynchronous chat or forum posting, status update postings and responses are limited by a word count thus making the conversation more concise. If users post a status update that is interesting, a rich conversation can sometimes flourish from this status update as illustrated in Figure 3. This unstructured conversation between friends in an informal environment gives the users freedom to express themselves. For the researcher, this is important as exchanges of meaning in this environment occur in a naturalistic yet virtual setting. 3.2 Analyzing Facebook Status update postings To illustrate how we can use SNS in intercultural research, we take a closer look at Nick, a 17-year old from Malaysia who is on exchange to the United States for a 6-month program. Nick is a regular user of Facebook who updates his status from several times a week to several times a day. During his time abroad to the United States, he posted 102 status updates to his wall. We found that one of the most common purpose of his status updates were to share his experiences with his friends. Occasionally, we also observed that the status updates are sometimes used to brag to friends on anything they find exciting to them. These experiences of differences (such as culture, weather or people) can be a useful source of information for the researcher to understand what a person is going through in their intercultural learning process. As status updates are often short burst of expressions or experiences, a single status update may not be able to provide a rich account of the experience. However, a collection of status updates over a longer period of time can show a trajectory of the experience a person values and finds important. For example, in the following five status updates, we demonstrate Nick’s experience with the weather. Nick first referred to the weather in a negative manner when he ranted that typing in the cold makes his hand numb (turn 1) and how the cold weather is wrecking his skin (turn 3). Subsequent status updates were more positive when he refers to how he is loves seeing the snow cascading down (turn 2) and how he marvels at the snow storm (turn 4). Being from a tropical climate, he feels such an experience perhaps exciting and worthwhile sharing. As the seasons changed, he continued to update his status to describe his feeling of the weather. In turn 5 he updated his status describing how he is enjoying the weather in spring. Table 1: Status updates on experiences valued by Nick Turn 1 2 3 4 5
Date Jan 21 Feb 21 Feb 23 Feb 27 Apr 18
Status Update Nick says typing in the cold is not fun with your fingers going numb :'( Nick loves looking at the snow cascading down from above :) Nick hates how the cold is wrecking his skin :[ Nick marvels at the snow storm taking place outside Nick just laid on the grass at the park shirtless. Ahh... spring :)
3.3 Creating the intercultural narration Using the status updates collected in the previous section, we can use these status updates to create a story of the participant’s intercultural learning experience. While the status updates may not mean much by itself, analyzing the status updates and the corresponding responses over a period of time can yield a more important account on the experience. However, this will require the researcher to interpret these status updates to create a meaningful story Lee, J.W.Y., Kim, B. & Kim, M.S. (2011). Creating the intercultural learning narrative using social network sites status updates: An innovative approach in using social media. In S. Barton et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Global Learn Asia Pacific 2011 (pp. 1819-1826). AACE.
on the experience. In this section, we will status updates similar to those in Table 1 to create a short narrative on Nick’s experience abroad with a focus on his adjustment back to his home country after the program. Nick is a 17-year old Malaysian who was selected to participate on an exchange program to the United States for 6 months. He was excited about his exchange when he updated his status that he was “ready to take on America”. Several days later, he updated his status to indicate he has received his host family placement. To show his excitement on this new development, he ended the status update with a *dances* to describe the action dancing. During the first few days upon arrival to the United States, he updated his status several times on his safe arrival to his host family and that they were “super nice”. Being from a tropical climate, Nick may not be used to the cold weather he was experiencing at that time. In his status update postings, Nick referred to the cold weather several times during the initial part of his stay. For example, Nick described the cold weather negatively by posting a status update describing how his fingers were going numb from the cold weather and that it was not fun typing that way and that how the cold weather was wrecking his skin. On the other hand, the cold weather was also something that Nick found interesting when he updated his status to describe how he marvels at the snow cascading from above and how he marvels the snow storm that was taking place outside his home. One of the biggest challenges that Nick will face is to adjust to his new environment. While the weather was something different for Nick, the host family plays an important role in the acculturation and adjustment process by making Nick feel welcomed to his new environment. This was observed in his Facebook status update after arriving two weeks when Nick updated his status to say that he loves his host family and several days later that he “is fitting in just fine”. The process of assimilating and learning a new culture is something that occurs over a period of time. It is important is that the learner reflects on their experience and the realization that changes are happening within themselves is a powerful tool in learning. Nick made this important reflection a month after he arrived when he updated his status asking if he “does really speak with an American accent”. Although he speaks English well, his reflection that he speaks with an American accent shows that he realized that he has unknowingly begun the assimilation process into his new host culture. It is common that sojourns develop a sense of homesickness when they start to reminisce memories of home or feel like a stranger in the new environment. Sojourns are known to miss things that are familiar to them such as food, people or the environment. Nick was no different that the other exchange students when he also gone through a period of homesickness. His first status update reflected this in mid February when he asks if it is wrong to feel this way and he wants to feel familiar. As this status update was posted in the initial stages during his exchange, it is likely that this is the beginning of his cultural assimilation process when he begins to realize the subtle cultural differences that were not apparent earlier on. A month later, we also observe a similar statement when he updated his status to indicate that he craves for cheesecake from a café back home and asks why he feels so. He ended the status update with a :( emoticon to indicate his unhappiness with feeling that way. Nick also experienced many positive experiences during his exchange that he wanted to share with his friends. During his exchange, he used his status updates inform his friends on the places he visited such as the Mall of America, watched a basketball game, and traveling to New York and to Los Angeles. In a way, these status updates serve as a way for Nick to brag to his friends about his experiences and is a form of social comparison where he is letting his friends know that he is doing well and also able to travel around during his time abroad. Three more months into the middle of his exchange program, Nick began to have conflicting feelings about returning home. This was indicated where he ended both of the status updates with an emoticon that indicates sadness. Despite feeling homesick two weeks ago, Nick updated his status to indicate that he was not ready to return home just yet. In his next status update, he shows conflicting emotions about returning home when he post a rhetoric question to indicate that he misses home but does not really want to return home. It a contrast as compared to when he first arrived in January where he was feeling homesick but the thought of an impending end to his exchange in 3 more months created this conflicting feeling of missing home but not ready to return home. Lee, J.W.Y., Kim, B. & Kim, M.S. (2011). Creating the intercultural learning narrative using social network sites status updates: An innovative approach in using social media. In S. Barton et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Global Learn Asia Pacific 2011 (pp. 1819-1826). AACE.
Although there were no further status updates referring to his departure in April and May, Nick started making several references in June as he approached closer to the end of the exchange program. He clearly had very conflicting emotions where he felt that he did not want to leave his American family (See turn 6). He reflected this in a status update when he posted “before I came, I was afraid. Now as my time here draws to a close end, my legs are trembling and my lips quiver” (turn 7). It is common to see exchange students having a strong sense of not wanting to return home as they approach closer to their return back home as they have started to grown accustomed to their new environment.
Table 2: Status updates towards the end of Nick’s stay abroad 6 7
June 15 June 16
8 9
June 29 June 30
Nick mood took a 360 degrees turn. I don't wanna go home yet. Nick before I came, I was afraid. Now as my time here draws to a close end, my legs are trembling and my lips quiver. Nick I don't want to leave. I really don't want to leave right now. Nick misses his american home already. Not joking. All this waiting is killing me. Gah!
Upon returning home to Malaysia, Nick continued using Facebook to reflect on his recent experience abroad by posting his thoughts on Facebook. He was having mixed feelings when he realizes that his exchange has come to an end and that the task of re-assimilating back to his home culture is something daunting. In Nick’s next status update, he made a very important realization that the task of re-assimilation is not as effortless as he thought it would be. Such reversal of feelings is something that most exchange students experience upon returning back home and the reentry process back to the home culture can be as difficult as the initial assimilation to the foreign culture. And thus, this concludes the story of Nick’s intercultural learning experience abroad of 6 months. While the intercultural learning experience does not end after his return We can see how Nick’s thoughts have changed and how he has developed intercultural competence over time. Initial status update postings such as those in turn 1 through turn 15 relates to superficial cultural observations such as the weather, his feelings on how great it was to be there and places that he was to visit. Towards the end of the program, his status update postings reflected heavily on his experiences during his time abroad. Although the statements made had negative emotions related to it, it was an important learning process that Nick had to experience before any intercultural learning can occur. This is based on an intercultural learning perspective where the ability to recognize cultural differences and make sense of the new knowledge is the most important aspect on how learning can occur.
4.0 Discussion The central aim of this paper is to create an account of the intercultural learning experience through Facebook status updates. To achieve this, we created the story through a careful selection of status updates posted by a participant on a 6-month intercultural exchange program called Nick. The story that was created is by no means a full account of the entire experience but we demonstrated how a researcher could use these status update postings to interpret the intercultural learning experience in a more naturalistic manner. The creations of these digital artifacts in an informal space such as a SNS gives an alternative insight into a participants feelings and emotions that was once limited to using written accounts such as blogs and journals or oral accounts such as interviews. As researchers interested in understanding the intercultural learning process, we view these digital artifacts as a digital extension of their experience during their time abroad on the intercultural exchange program. Similar to journals or blogs, postings on SNS can be used as an avenue for a participant to express their feelings. By analyzing these digital artifacts over a period of time, researchers are able to gain insights into emotions and critical incidences that are otherwise difficult to obtain through interviews or surveys. In the previous section, we described an example how we created a quick snapshot into an exchange student’s experience of traveling to the Lee, J.W.Y., Kim, B. & Kim, M.S. (2011). Creating the intercultural learning narrative using social network sites status updates: An innovative approach in using social media. In S. Barton et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Global Learn Asia Pacific 2011 (pp. 1819-1826). AACE.
United States, adjusting to the culture there and adjusting to the culture back home by collecting and analyzing his status updates postings over a period of 7 months. From our analysis of over 3000 status update postings by 16 participants in another study, we observed that there is a vast amount of information that is contained within Facebook and does not include other features such as notes, wall comments or photo comments that could possibly yield a richer account of the intercultural learning experience. Although status updates are short messages of up to 420 characters, we have demonstrated that it is possible for researchers to obtain rich amount of information through the analysis of short text collected over a period of time. Comments from friends and the interaction between them can further provide information that is similar to a recorded conversation. The researcher can then use the research questions to focus on these status updates and comments to triangulate any findings that they may obtain from interviews, questionnaires or any other sources. For example, researchers interested in understanding how social support affects the adjustment process in a foreign culture for example our previous study (See Lee, Kim and Kim (2010)) where we described using status updates to gain an understanding into critical emotional related incidences that may affect the intercultural learning process. A researcher interested in understanding what role this social support play can use SNS as an avenue for their observation. Due to the informal nature of this environment, a person is more likely to speak candidly about their problems and the ability to crowdsource their problem to many people simultaneously makes it an attractive avenue for people to seek social support. While the use of SNS remains largely popular among the Net savvy generation, we would like to caution that not everyone will be an active user of SNS. Although an individual may have an account on multiple SNS, it does not mean that they would be actively updating the site with what they are doing. These passive users do not produce contents such as status updates, sharing links or write “notes”. Such individuals use SNS to casually keep in contact with friends and not use such sites to disseminate information. Due to the lack of updates or comments to friends, they may seem to be an inactive user of SNS. A researcher using SNS should be cautious of the fact that although technology is an enabler, it can be a barrier for those who are not technologically inclined as they may require more time to familiarize themselves with the technology. Despite us advocating the use of SNS as a research methodology, there are several concerns that researchers may have to consider when using this new media. In the next section, we will discuss some of the issues researchers should consider when using SNS as a tool for research.
5.0 Summary In this paper, we described a novel approach in using social network sites to gain insights into the intercultural learning process of participants on an exchange program. This study contributes to the growing literature on SNS that we hope will have methodological implications in both the field of computer mediated communication and intercultural learning. We took into account an extensive discussion by boyd and Ellison (2008) on social network sites and proposed a methodology for using SNS status updates to provide a rich ethnographic account using intercultural learning as a context how this methodology can be applied, The examples described in Section 3 of this paper provides several examples of the types of information a researcher may obtain from analyzing the status updates. As compared to journal writing or interviews, the informal nature of SNS also allows for the users of such sites to express themselves in a more relaxed manner and also provides a different perspective. When triangulated with other sources such as journals or interviews, we can use these artifacts from SNS to corroborate any findings. However, we observed that there are two groups of SNS users. One group are individuals who are not too comfortable with sharing information online and on the other hand are individuals who have no reservations with sharing anything and everything that comes into their minds. Therefore, we suggest that it is still important that analysis of SNS be used in conjunction interviews, surveys or questionnaires in order to have a clearer understanding on the learning process of the intercultural learner.
Lee, J.W.Y., Kim, B. & Kim, M.S. (2011). Creating the intercultural learning narrative using social network sites status updates: An innovative approach in using social media. In S. Barton et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of Global Learn Asia Pacific 2011 (pp. 1819-1826). AACE.
While the use of social media is relatively new, we attempt to propose the use of social network sites as a non intrusive research tool rather than as an intervention. With the increasing interest in the use of social media in research, we have shown in this study how social network sites can be used as a source for gaining insights into intercultural learning for participants on a student exchange program. The affordances within social network sites allow researchers the opportunity to tap into a resource that can potentially be a powerful research tool. This study demonstrated just one of the many potential from analyzing status updates and comments posted by participants on an intercultural exchange program. We also see SNS as one of the sources for gaining a better understanding on the intercultural development process. There are also many other affordances within a social network site that a researcher can further tap into for their own research purposes. What is clear is that researchers will be finding more novel approaches in using social media in their research in the near future.
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