• The impact of the Information Technologies (focus in Internet) on the Universities
• Clasification of Social media applications
• Benefits of Social media and Cloud Computing applications
• Social media as a collaborative and communication tool between administrative & teaching environments
• The problems of the e-mail as the only way of online communication
• Implementation methodology

At the middle of Janaury of this year, I decided to send this article to the 9th Iberoamerican Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics CISCI 2010 (29th june to 2nd july)  from Orlando, Florida, USA. Fortunately they accepted it for being part of the conference. Not to much to say about it, just happy for my first International participation outside of México. Let me invite you to see the photos of my experience in Orlando on my Flickr.

Finally, I would like to thank to my school, Faculty of Telematics, for all the support, specially to teachers: M. C. Ricardo Acosta and MTI. Silvia Fajardo; and also for the great time shared in Orlando with: M.Eng. Pedro Santana, phD. Antonio Guerrero and Ing. Hugo Cortés.

Note: If you want a copy of my article or presentation, just write me at me(a)hectorguedea.com , I’ll happy to send it to you.

The students’ attendance was so good (438 students in total), I had to give my talk on two occasions for some problems with the size of the place, more than 200 students in each session. Each talk was around 1 hour, some general topics were:

1. A brief introduction about the evolution of the comunication, physical and digital.
2. What is “Social network” and  ”Social Networking”.
3. General characteristics of social networking sites.
4. History of social networking sites.
5. The most important social networking sites and interesting data.
6. the usage of social networking and difference between email & social networking sites.
7. Advantages and Disadvantages.
8. Desktop & Cellphone applications.
9. Social networking and youth.
10. Social networking and companies.
11. Social networking and México.
12. The future of social networking.

I tried to give my talk very interactive, so I received very good feedbacks about them. For example:

• 100% know Youtube and Facebook.
• 15%  don´t know about Twitter.
• 98% use Facebook as principal social networking site.
• 30% use Twitter.
• 25% use Metroflog.
• 5% use Hi5, but they didn’t found it interesting as Facebook.
• 90% doesn’t know the difference between Facebook and Twitter.

The principal questions were: business model of the social networks (focus in Facebook, Youtube, Twitter – how they make money), privacity/security of the data,  difference between social networking sites, and more. At the end, It was a pretty good experience for me.

I would like to thank to the teachers, L.I. Bertha Alicia Cobian Machuca and Ing. Emmanuel Alvarez Paredes for their kindness and help at the event.

Here are some photos, and also you can see more of them at Flickr:

This morning I was excited when I see the most active groups are latinoamericans (Español (the whole latinoamerican countries), Brazil, Colombia, Chile, México), so go head and join to us.

I’m not going to review the movie, far from it, but I found very interesting how the Pandora Villagers could extract and share information from their deceased ancestors and alive people. It is interesting for one reason, the strong relationship with the current social networks and the possible future ones. The Pandora Villagers used the own nature as a database, which it was open, interoperable and linked, that means, they could used it in any physical media. Villagers could access to the information in any time and way.

The huge amount of data generated by users everyday in social networks cover a large percentage of Internet data, becoming an important source of information and knowledge, but We still live with hermetic databases, not interoperable social networks (except for desktop applications or social networks with the same owner), where the rich dataset (information) is reserved for popular social networks. This problem has wanted to fight with many projects (in conjunction with the Semantic Web, Linking Open Data and FOAF) with the main idea of the open and interoperable web. However, these projects are about 10 years and still have not been consolidated.

The nature of the Villagers to use the data  it is a bliss that we could see in our planet earth in a near future if It existed a general policy for each social networking sites, and not only create their own policies. I’d love to see someday the real and nature combination of Ubiquitous Computing, Augmented reality and Cloud Computing into social networks, for the simple reason: being a part of EVERYTHING and not just a THING.

It is difficult say that Web 2.0 became the Web in social, because since the Web was born people could collaborate and communicate online, but one of the biggest successes with the Web 2.0 is simple: the easy way to do it!. Almost of the principal services of this generation are easy and free; for example, people can create a personal page with social networking sites or write online with blogs without knowledge of web programming or pay.

Status

Now we see the hit of social networkings sites like Facebook with 350 millions of users, if Facebook were a country, it would be the 4th largest in the world, amazing!, don’t you think?. And of course we’ve another good example of success but with a different type of communication, I’m talking about microblogging platforms like Twitter, that we respond a simple question: what do you doing?, and that simple question was adopted and also forgot it in the pass of the years. The different of social networks like Facebook and Twitter is in the way of people communicate (Facebook = Synchronous, Twitter = Asynchronous). The benefits of being a part of this sites are a lot, and of course you know them, but my favorites are the community, the social tools and the conversations, everything in real-time.

The buzz of these sites on these days are becoming a food of companies and for people, people think that social networks are generating a lot of money with them; so if we talk about the business model of the social networks used, we got a big black hole, for example, Facebook has got a good investors: Paypal with $500 thousand, Microsoft with $240 million and Digital Sky Technologies with $200 million dollars (and a few more), of course advertisement is other type business model, but this has not worked well on social sites. Twitter has the same history, they could not find how monetize the service.

Who are making money?

Social networks have provided a rich source of potential customers to the companies, the consumer has been centralized and labeled, so in a short deduction: free and directly publicity for costumers. So that becomes a great marketing for companies: being a part of the costumer conversation. Why do not we ask the directives of these social networks what they think about this situation? Making money though your site and you are only watching it.. Great!. I think this is certainly great potential to exploit now that there is strong demand from users.

Conclusion

In conclusion we could say that social networks are rich, yes!, but in users and information (data generated by users).

The topic of my talk was very general, titled “Introduction to Computers”, in my presentation, I included: What are the computers?, What does a computer?, What are the types of computers?, Why are computers useful?, etc.. I tried to keep the student´s attention through a very enjoyable and participatory talk, I did’t do to much, they really were interest in know about computers. In my talk I discovered interesting things with some questions to them. My questions were:

• How many of you have used a computer?
• The answer was: ALL.

• How many of you have a computer at home?
• The answer was: 2 of 33 students.

• How many of you are going to cyber coffe to use the computer?
• The answer was: 27 of 33 students.

• Have you ever used a computer at your school?
• The answer was: None.

• Why not have used it at school?
• The answer was: Not for us, its only for teachers.

So, what important is bring technology to classrooms if the students or teachers do not use it? And most of the computers with Enciclomedia are obsolete for various reasons (viruses, broken equipment, etc.). In fact the room that I was assigned to give my talk the computer is’nt work, so we had to go to another classroom with a works computer. The percentage of children using cyber coffes was very high, so ask them, what do they do in the cyber coffes?   The answers were:

• - Searching information on the internet
• - For homework
• - Chat: a boy of 12 years old have email and instant messaging?, jesus!.
• - Play videogames

If we see the computer knowledge of these students has been based to a discovery learning, a fully cognitive schema. In a slide a put a photo of students using the computer, and I asked them, What do you think that they are doing?, they immediately said the same things that they do at the cyber coffes (see photo).

After my presentation the students  asked some questions , which ranged from the simple to some very interesting, one of them has to do with the Interaction Human-Computer, which was:

• Why do we must use the mouse to move things of the computer? And why not just use my finger or my hand?

Interesting question, don’t you think?, A boy of 12 years old with the same kind of question than a University researcher. Others, like: Who invented the computer?, How important are the computers?, What kind of stuff  I can do with Internet?,  and a lot of more.

At the end of this experience is more than clear that the efforts of the Government of Mexico to bring technology as a support  of learning-teaching at the classroom is inadequate, especially in general aspects between the student and computing, and even when efforts are directed toward the student, the student does not feel part of this, so look for other alternatives, like going to a cyber coffe to take advantage of technology in their entertainment, communication and academic life.

My native lenguage is Spanish (I’m proud to be a Mexican Engineer), but I decided to write in English for practice it and get within the greater community of professionals who are looking information in English. Maybe at the beginning of my posts I will mess a little bit but I hope soon mastered the language.

I will post my first entry very soon, please add my RSS or follow me at Twitter.