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This chapter offers reflections on the successes and failures of integrating the micro-blogging platform Twitter into a first-year university class. Twitter, intended as a way to answer the question “What are you doing?” is now used in originally unexpected ways. Broadly speaking, Twitter's popularity can be traced to three factors: conversation between users; a decentralized ecosystem of third-party applications; and as a result, the distributed nature of the users. Adopted by educators in higher education, Twitter has been used as: an object for study, a tool to communicating classroom announcements, as a way to enable student to reflect on their learning, a chance to get instant feedback from students, and as the specific tool used to facilitate in-class conversations. The ongoing use of micro-blogging also appears to have an ability to change the social dynamics of a classroom, expanding the social of the classroom beyond the physical. While identifying Twitter's limitations, the chapter outlines the most significant outcome from the author's integration of Twitter: an evolution of blended learning, proposed as a plesiochronous learning model, where learning occurs outside the classroom, with learner and instructor in different places but occurring at (virtually) the same time.

Plato and contemporary thinkers including American philosopher Martha Nussbaum have emphasized the need for political consciousness among the youth. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defence of Reform in Liberal Education by Nussbaum expressed that

It would be catastrophic to become a nation of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others.

It would be catastrophic to become a nation of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others.

Ideologically, it has been proven that advancement in technology can shift social ethos if we use it intelligently and then technology can lead to activism.

Digital activism can be defined as the use of electronic communication devices, for example, social media, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, e-mail, e-blogging, micro-blogging and podcast for different forms of activism. It enables citizens to express ideology and spread information to a large audience regarding human rights. In this context, researchers have explored the level of digital activism among pupil teachers and found very little awareness regarding the same. Findings also reveal that the level of digital activism does not have any significant effect on attitude toward human rights and peace. Although findings reveal that attitude toward peace and human rights is positively correlated with each other. Therefore, on the basis of the findings, an intervention program for digital activism has been suggested at the end of this chapter that can foster digital activism among them.

The era of globalization has increased the challenges for multinational corporations (MNCs) to retain legitimacy. In striving for legitimacy, MNCs increasingly engage in dialogue processes with their stakeholders. However, the era of globalization and the parallel rise of the Internet and the new “Web 2.0” have dramatically widened the range of options for such dialogue processes. Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in particular make use of “social media” (e.g., Facebook, Weblogs, Twitter) which enable them to quickly generate attention regarding socially and environmentally harmful business practices by MNCs. In response, MNCs have started applying social media technologies for corporate communication purposes. However, given the novelty of these activities, we lack knowledge on how these organizations make use of social media. Therefore, in this chapter, we examine how MNCs and NGOs utilize one particular social media application, that is, Twitter, for dialogic stakeholder communication.

In our empirical study, we examine current practices of Twitter usage by MNCs and NGOs. We investigate a dataset of more than 3,000 Twitter articles from 30 MNCs and 30 NGOs in the German-speaking world. Our analysis is based on the “conceptual orality or literality” scale by Koch and Oesterreicher (1994).

The comparative analysis shows that on average MNCs and NGOs exhibit a surprisingly similar profile on Twitter. Both tend toward conceptual literality. However, the analysis of Tweets per organization reveals a much larger variance. At the extreme poles, while some NGOs (like Greenpeace Youth) make extensive use of the medium’s potential for conceptual orality, some MNCs (like Deutsche Börse) almost entirely adhere to conceptual literality. In other words, these MNCs promote a classical one-way model of communication and fail to make use of the dialogue-like qualities of the medium.

We analyzed a small number of organizations and we restricted our study to MNCs and NGOs in the German-speaking world. Furthermore, Twitter only allows for short messages with a maximum of 140 letters or signs. This, in turn, renders questionable whether the medium is suited to establish deliberative dialogues between MNCs and NGOs that are based on more elaborate arguments which can be expressed in the short format.

Our study addresses the lack of research regarding new possibilities for stakeholder communication in the age of social media. Moreover, the study methodologically contributes to the study of social media in the context of corporate communication by applying the scale of “conceptual orality or literality” to MNCs’ and NGOs’ Twitter usage.

This chapter analyses the Norwegian Twitter-sphere during and in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in Norway on 22 July 2011. Based on a collection of 2.2 million tweets representing the Twitter-sphere during the period 20 July–28 August 2011, the chapter seeks answers to how the micro-blogging services aided in creating situation awareness (SA) related to the emergency event, what role hashtags played in that process and who the dominant crisis communicators were. The chapter is framed by theories and previous research on SA and social media use in the context of emergency events. The findings reveal that Twitter was important in establishing SA both during and in the aftermath of the terrorist attack, that hashtags were of limited value in this process during the critical phase, and that unexpected actors became key communicators.

The job market for communication majors increasingly expects those graduating in these specializations to not only know how to create strategic plans for using social media in both one-way and two-way communication environments, but also maintain proper social media etiquette and virtual culture norms for their clients. To better prepare students for this expectation, two faculty members at separate universities designed and implemented a course assignment intended to promote cross-university collaboration, foster discussion, and bring students to use microblogging via Twitter. This assignment was designed so that it would not only have the students construct the meaning and best practices in a social setting using social media, but also encourage them to experience Twitter from a user perspective while building relationships in a manner that their future employers may have to work with their publics or customers. Overall, the educators involved in this project did feel that it was a beneficial assignment for students in both classes. While the students may not appreciate the assignment while it is being conducted, many of them have expressed the value in it now that the assignment is completed.

An essential part of the transfer of knowledge in the tourism and hospitality industry, destination image is defined as the expression of objective knowledge, imagination, and the subjective emotions of the tourist. Social media is profoundly changing the way the tourist images and interacts with the destination environment. In turn, firms in the industry are seeking to leverage the power of social media to gain insights into tourist cognition and behavior. In this chapter, we analyze various social media to investigate knowledge transfer relating to two groups of hotels in Philadelphia, and we propose a methodology to predict future lodging demand from empirical data in line with the objectives of the t-Forum.

Universities are populated with a wide range of disciplines. The science disciplines and their instructors are stereotyped as tech-savvy while in the past humanities faculty have sometimes been seen as technophobic and traditional. As we advance through the second decade of the 21st century, we find instructors in all areas are embracing new technologies in their teaching. Our students have been born digital (Tapscott, 2009) and have not only experienced online games and social networking technologies such as Facebook but thrive in them. It should not be surprising that many of our colleagues are trying out the use of social media in their courses. This volume embodies a sharing of such experiences with the aim of moving you up the learning curve so that your thinking about how these new technologies might spark excitement, interaction, sharing, and enhanced work and learning by your students.

With a focus on Canada, but framed by similar and shared concerns emerging in the United States, this chapter examines the current status of what constitutes and defines academic freedom for academic librarians and the rights and the protections individual, professional academic librarians have with respect to the freedom of speech and expression of their views in speech and writing within and outside of their institutions. It reviews the historical background of academic freedom and librarianship in Canada, academic freedom language in collective agreements, rights legislation in Canada versus the United States as it pertains to academic librarianship, and rights statements supported by Canadian associations in the library field and associations representing members in postsecondary institutions. The implications of academic librarians using the new communication technologies and social media platforms, such as blogs and networking sites, with respect to academic freedom are examined, as well as, an overview of recent attacks on the academic freedom of academic librarians in the United States and Canada. Included in this analysis are the results of a survey of Canadian academic librarians, which examined attitudes about academic freedom, the external and internal factors which have an impact on academic freedom, and the professional use of new communication technologies and social media platforms.

The communication of messages and initiatives still remains the missing piece in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) practice. Traditional media and corporate websites (ruled by a one-way communication process) have failed to promote an open and interactive CSR communication process with different groups of stakeholders.

Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Pinterest, among other social media platforms, allow users to interact and collaborate with each other. For example, people are empowered through social media to demand more transparency regarding corporate operations that can impact society and environment. Therefore, with the popularisation of social media, companies must understand that today more than ever, they should effectively communicate sustainability practices with the purpose of building and improving stakeholder relationships. But are companies ready to engage in CSR communication through social media? In other words, are they ready to invest in relationships?

This chapter analyses how corporations use social media for CSR communication. A content analysis methodology was used to examine Twitter official corporate profiles of 50 Fortune companies over the course of a two-month period. The purpose of this investigation was to discover what type of CSR and Sustainability core subjects were communicated and the type of communication presented in the messages.

This chapter aims to investigate the research status and development of virtual community (VC) in China by a critique of library and information science (LIS) journal articles and to put forward future directions in virtual community for the researchers in our discipline. We used a multiple case of methods including bibliometric approaches (such as keyword frequency and co-word analysis) and a coding system to reveal several characteristics of the research status quo and trends. The results show that from 2000 to the present, VC-related research by LIS Chinese scholars has experienced rapid development with an increasing number of academic papers, authors, journals and institutions. However, LIS research is still at an early stage with the slow introduction of fundamental concepts and frameworks, lack of theoretical support, and organisations focused on empirical studies. VC-related research in China in recent years fully demonstrates its diversified attributes. Our study is limited to the analysis of academic journal literature published in mainland China while excluding dissertations and books, and publications in Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan. Our classification system also needs to be more specific. Our findings have implications for researchers, students, journals and sponsors of Chinese LIS research related to virtual communities.