A Mobile Social Networking Application for Academics and for Collaborative Learning

A Mobile Social Networking Application for Academics and for Collaborative Learning

Chapter One

Aims and Objectives of the Study

Since the use of social networking application as a tool for collaborative learning and information system increases on daily bases, it is of great importance to deal with some of the loop-holes that hinders the smooth running of the existing systems for academic learning. Through the review of the existing systems (applications), our aim is to build a mobile application (which will also run as a web application) that will implement most of the functionalities mentioned in the problem statement. Our objective is to implement these features in our application by;

1. Building a closed system for each group or class using the application: This will have an efficient authentication technique in other to bridge access to only members of a group or class thereby improving absolute privacy.
2. Building an improved information system: This will be use for updating class information and announcement.
3. Building an instant SMS notification technique for information: This will always notify the members of a class with a text message if any information or announcement is sent in the information system.
4. Creation of file that holds all lecture history for different topic: This will help students who are not in the lecture room during the class to conveniently read the entire lecturer’s post on the topic.
5. Building Mechanism for cautioning and controlling student’s acts on the forum: This will make students to be serious during class or discussion time so as to achieve a comfortable environment for learning.

CHAPTER TWO

REVIEW OF RELATED RESEARCH

General Overview of Information Communication Technology

Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is viewed as both a means and an end for development. With roughly two-third of the world economy based on services, and the rise of India, Philippines, and other nations as global IT players, many developing countries have accepted ICT as a national mission. Even within manufacturing and industry, ICT has an increasingly important role to play. During 1995–2002, when the US economy posted impressive overall growth, nearly one-third of the growth in productivity was attributable to ICT.

While the growth rates of ICT even in developing countries are impressive, the base upon which these apply is very low. The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Phase I brought to the forefront the role of ICT for development. Organized by the United Nations in conjunction with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), this Summit emphasized the growing relevance of ICT in the global domain. Phase I was attended by more than 11,000 participants from 175 countries, and Phase II was held in Tunisia in November 2005. A summary of the development targets for 2015 emerging out of WSIS is given below:

1. to connect villages with ICTs and establish community access points;
2. to connect universities, colleges, secondary schools and primary schools with ICTs;
3. to connect scientific and research centers with ICTs;
4. to connect public libraries, cultural centers, museums, post offices and archives with

ICTs;

5. to connect health centers and hospitals with ICTs;
6. to connect all local and central government departments and establish websites and email addresses;
7. to adapt all primary and secondary school curricula to meet the challenges of the Information Society, taking into account national circumstances;
8. to ensure that all of the world’s population have access to television and radio services;
9. to encourage the development of content and to put in place technical conditions in order to facilitate the presence and use of all world languages on the Internet;
10. to ensure that more than half of the world’s inhabitants have access to ICTs within their reach.

Interestingly, these targets deal primarily with ICT infrastructure. Based on official analyst and online reports, there were several major issues and points of contention at WSIS, including:

1. Who Pays for Bridging the Digital Divide?
2. Use of Open Source Software
3. Intellectual Property Rights
4. Freedom of Information and Rights of Individuals (balanced with security needs and concerns)
5. Internet Governance and Control.

The birth and the growth of the Internet were in the United States, and this has led, in part, to large distortions in connectivity between the developed and developing nations. However, economics remains the obvious overarching reason for the continuation of the divide. Data from the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA) show that the Internet is overwhelmingly concentrated in a few locations. An exception is the East Asian developing countries, notably South Korea and China. In the last few years, these countries have been aggressively building next generation networks using the next generation of Internet Protocol, IPv6. Much of this divide is due to legacy reasons, and locations of hosts and users. A consequence of this is the dominating use of English language in the Internet, with content largely hosted in the United States. This has profound implications on not only network design, but also on economics. International connectivity is a major expense and bottleneck for most developing countries. In some countries, even a few megabits of connectivity cost hundreds of thousands of dollars annually! Most trans-oceanic optical fibers interconnect only at specific locations in developing countries, and the capacity is largely used for voice communications, which is more lucrative and commercially predictable.

In 1965, Gordon Moore (of Intel) predicted that computing power would double every 18 months. This was based not on theory but on empirical extrapolation, and “Moore’s Law” has essentially been validated for decades since.Indeed, today’s scientific calculator selling for less than $50 has more computational power than the systems used to land an astronaut on the moon. More impressively, when we factorimprovements in storage, optics, and wireless technologies, the price-performance curve for ICT looks even more dramatic. As per IBM reports, the annual growth rates of hard disk storage (per square inch) accelerated over the 1990s from ~60% to approximately 100%, and annual memory growth rate is also ~40%. Optical networking is growing yet faster (“Gilder’s Law”) and transmission capabilities have been doubling in roughly

9 months, sometimes even faster. All these improvements in technology have resulted not only in enhanced capabilities, but also in dramatically bringing down the costs. Consider, for instance, wireless technologies. When 802.11 (wireless LAN) devices were originally created (before the WiFi standard), the speed was only 2 megabits per second (Mbps), and the costs were in the thousand-dollar range. Now, variants of 802.11 run as fast as 108 Mbps, and are orders of magnitude cheaper. This dramatic improvement came about because of standards and volume. Similarly, there is volume available in the global marketplace for new technologies, but only if fragmentation of technology standards across countries can be overcome.

The simplified model of ICT masks the challenges that require extensive research, both in technology and in the social sciences. We list below several issues that determine the viability of ICT for sustainable development, primarily focused on traditional computing and connectivity. Some of these are common to the needs of developed countries as well, but they often have institutions and mechanisms to address some of these issues. Digital Divides – Awareness, Availability, Accessibility, and Affordability.The digital divide is actually a manifestation of other underlying divides, spanning economic, social, geographic, gender, and other divides.Attempting to address the digital divide as a cause instead of a symptom of other divides has led to many failures of ICT driven development projects. The above four interrelated features determine the value of ICT for a user.

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CHAPTER THREE

SYSTEM ANALYSIS AND METHODOLOGY

Analysis of the Present System

Some mobile social networking applications or sites for academic purpose and for collaborative learning that are existing have thus far been identified. The mode in which the system (application) that are already been built for this same purpose operates and perform have in a wider range helped in extending academic activities which includes learning beyond the shores of classroom even anywhere and anytime. For the purpose of this study, there is need to analyse in general those systems that are in use now in academia.

The existence and functionalities of these applications have provided us with the basis for our analysis. Edmodo and Twiducate are designed with much similar functionality like teachers obtaining range of password from the application server and sharing them among his students in other for them to have access to the forum information which makes the application environment to be secured to some extent. There is no room for having lectures online with them but these applications are used basically for uploading assignments, submission of assignments, discussion between teachers and students, where both parties ought to be online at the same time. Even though one can organize lectures with Facebook group chat, Whatsapp chat etc, its security measures as regards to who have access to the class is highly poor. The issues of cyber-bullying which is one of the factor that distort social discussion have not been carefully dealt with in the present systems. The present systems allows teachers and their students to be online for their class discussion, however its ability to get every student of a class to be online while the teacher have a discussion with them is rated low. The comments dropped by the teacher and his students during their discussion are placed on a single form with distinct name and comment time. Some other systems existing as a social networking application for academics serves as an online resource library for teachers and students e.g My-Big-Campus, ScolaMates etc.

CHAPTER FOUR

SYSTEM DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION

 Introduction

System Designit is an integral stage of the software development which entails a detailed and structured analysis and design of the system. The specifications of processing requirements such as input, output file and master are taking into consideration with the segmentation of their processing into programs. This is done to improve the functionalities when compared with the already present system. In the development of a system, the underlying and detailed description on how the system was conceptualized through design and how the system was developed through implementation is inevitable. The design of the proposed system under study is done using waterfall and object oriented analysis and design methodology (OOADM). Several diagram, figures and artifacts are used in this chapter to provide the detailed information about the design of the proposed system. Thus the detailed explanation of what the proposed system is all about is given below in different sub-sections.

CHAPTER FIVE

SUMMARY, RECOMMENDATION AND CONCLUSION

The importance of system documentation is to provide necessary information about the system, and also to make it easy for another analyst or developer to understand the system and be able to maintain and upgrade it subsequently.

Summary

The objectives of this project has been fulfilled as the researcher have shown the use of a mobile and web base approach in developing a mobile social networking application for academics and for collaborative learning and applying the mechanism for cautioning student who misbehaves in the forum and sending an instant SMS to all student users whenever there is any news or announcement in the forum, thereby improving active participation of all users in the forum class.

Mobile and web based approach are tools, which will replace the present social networking application that has been used in academics for learning. The application has all the needed functionalities to provide an excellent and well organized lecture online without a physical classroom. The application also provides a serene environment outside the physical classroom where students can meet to share knowledge and improve in wisdom on topics that have been taught by their lecturer during the school hour. Through this research study, analysis was carried out to discover the limitations and weaknesses on the present system that has been in use for this purpose. The presence of these limitations and weaknesses gave rise to the design and the implementation of the proposed system under study.

Review of Achievements

The objectives that were earlier stated in this project work were successfully met with almost the clear implementation of what was conceptualized and designed at the beginning of this work. The area that was achieved by this project work was a mobile social networking application that has the functionalities of:

1. A closed system in the forum application: where only authorized users (lecturer and students) can gain access to the forum or class thereby improving absolute privacy.
2. An improved information system: This will be use for updating class information and announcements.
3. An instant SMS notification technique for information: This will always notify the members of a class with a text message if any information or announcement is sent in the information system.
4. A File that holds all lecture history for different topic: This will help students who are not in the lecture room during the class to conveniently read the entire lecturer’s post on the topic.
5. A Mechanism for cautioning and controlling student’s acts on the forum: This will make students to be serious during class or discussion time so as to achieve a comfortable environment for learning.

Area of Application

The Mobile Social Networking Application for Academics and for Collaborative Learning named “DegreeMate15” is an android app and also a web app that has been designed to be used for educational activities. The areas it can be used for are stated below:

1. For conducting  lectures online
2. For conducting educational discussion among students to enhance collaborative learning.
3. For having general discussion for non-academic issues.
4. For uploading files like pictures, links etc.

Suggestion for Future Work

The application built in this project work has thus far met its major objectives and design. Throughout this project work, there are some technical functionalities that could not feature in this work which are still relevant for this kind of application. Some of these functionalities are:

1. Building the mobile app version that will be compatible with the operating system of other smart phones.
2. Creation of separate column for lecturer’s post and student’s comments, contributions and questions during class.
3. Customization of lecture room for each course offered by a particular set of students.
4. Inculcating mechanism for video caption during lecture hour.

Recommendation

The mobile social networking application for academics and for collaborative learning built in this project work is recommended to the lecturers and students of the Department of Computer Science NnamdiAzikiwe University, Awka for the purpose of conducting lectures online as an alternative to having lectures on physical classroom and inculcating active participation of students in learning process even after school hour. This mobile application is also recommended to other academicians who wish to use this application for the same purposes as stated above in this section.

Conclusion

This project work was successively carried out with some other achievements such as eliminating some of the weaknesses and shortcoming of the present academic social networking application. The users can have access into the forum application anywhere they are once they are with their smart phone or with their computer system. All the user needs is just an internet connection to the host server. There will no longer be cases of a malfunctioning computer or mobile phone as the software can be accessed from any computer or mobile phone with internet access, provided it meets the hardware and software requirements. There is little or no poor information facility because the application provides the users with instant SMS notification on user’s mobile phone, whenever any announcement is posted in the forum. Even when a student is late for the lecture, all he/she need to do is to locate the particular lecture topic that he/she was not available when it was taught, open the topic and view the detailed run down of the lecture.

REFERENCE

• Boyd, D.M. & Ellison, N.B. (2007). Social network sites: Definition, history, and scholarship.Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 13, 210-230.
• Cohen, L. S. (2009, April 30). Is There A Difference Between Social Media And Social      Networking? Retrieved December 4, 2010, from lonscohen: http://lonscohen.com/blog/2009/04/difference-between-social-media-and-social-networking/
• Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison (2007). A work-in-progress, introduction to the JCMC special issue on Social Network Sites. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html .
• Dick Stroud (2008). Social networking: An age-neutral commodity. Journal of Direct, Data and Digital Marketing Practice (2008) 9, 278 – 292. doi: 10.1057/palgrave.dddmp.4350099
• Edmodo Teacher guide: The social learning network for the classroom.http://susd.edmodo.com/guide
• Edmodo. (2010). Edmodo. Retrieved from www.edmodo.com

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