Conferences
Associate Professor Dawn Schrader is organizing and chairing a conference session for the annual American Association for Educational Research conference. She will chair the Moral Development and Education Special Interest Group’s session.
Lectures
On March 27, 2024, Professor Lee Humphreys delivered the Dr. Melvin L. DeFleur Distinguished Lecture at the College of Communication, Boston University, entitled “Sensor-Mediated Communication and the Internet of Things.” In her talk, Lee explored several theoretical approaches and methods of studying the ways that people adopt and integrate communication technologies into their everyday lives. Drawing on a multi-year interdisciplinary project, Lee described a case exploring the adoption of an Internet of Things network in small communities and identified different characteristics of sensor-mediated communication. The talk concluded with reflections about how we study various kinds of technologies with a communication lens. On March 28, 2024, Lee participated in the Social Media and Well-Being in Context speaker series, which took place at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. In her session, Adolescents, Schools, Families and Friends, she discussed the ways that families, often women, use social media to document the development, milestones, and changes in families in order to maintain social and kin relations. She also argued that people have used media broadly defined to do this for more than a century.
Associate Professor Neil Lewis, Jr., delivered an invited lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. In the lecture, “Cultivating (Un)equal minds: Meaning Making in a Fragmented Democracy,” Neil shared recent findings about how segregation and other forms of social stratification affect the ways that Americans think, feel, and communicate with each other. He focused particular attention on how fractures in our social and media ecosystems affect our collective understanding of multiple forms of inequality in society—inequality in education, health, environment, and criminal justice systems—and what that means for both research on these topics and efforts to address these social issues.
Professor Y. Connie Yuan will deliver an eCornell keynote lecture entitled “Mindfulness Meditation: Becoming Self-Aware and More Inclusive.” During the lecture, Connie will address some common Westernized misconceptions when it comes to meditation. She will also demonstrate proper meditation techniques and further explain the value of mindfulness. Follow the link above to register for the lecture.
Media Coverage
Research Associate Sarah Gilbert was quoted in two articles: a Washington Post article entitled “Reddit’s Shares Soar in Stock Market Debut” and the Nature article, “How Scientists Are Making the Most of Reddit.”
Publications
Wenting Zou, Amanda Purington Drake, Philipp Masur, Janis Whitlock, and Professor Natalie Bazarova, April 2024, “Examining Learners’ Engagement Patterns and Knowledge Outcome in an Experiential Learning Intervention for Youth's Social Media Literacy,” Computers & Education. The study informing this article examined how learners’ engagement patterns predicted learning outcomes (social media literacy) in a Social Media TestDrive environment. Two types of data were collected from: 1) n = 150 youth participants in a controlled environment (“data from the classroom”), and 2) n = 3552 participants on the internet (“data in the wild”). The findings revealed learners’ engagement patterns (e.g., time spent, completion rate of actions, etc.) in different phases of experiential learning and highlighted the importance of active participation (taking recommended actions instead of passively viewing the course content) in predicting better learning outcomes. Their study offers practical implications for the improvement of instructional design to enhance experiential learning.
