In front of my presentation room.

Group pic – me with a group of talented researchers around the world

I was awarded two travel grants by the Department of Education Studies and College of Education and Human Ecology to present my research paper in the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) conference. The title of my research is “Social Networking and Internet-self-efficacy”. The study demystified the relationship between students’ social network usage and their blogging performance in a college-level course by empirically analyzing their behaviors in the blogger-centered course. The results showed that  1) the communication domain of Internet self-efficacy had no significant relation with any blogging behaviors, indicating educators should not assume that students who can use Facebook and twitter would naturally can use bloggers other social medias in the context of education; and 2) generation domain are positively impacting on all blogging behaviors. Thus, educators should design certain tasks or activities to enhance such high-level domain.

AECT is a professional association of educators and practitioners who aim to improve instruction through technology. The Association has become a major organization for those actively involved in the designing of instruction and research of technology application in education. It provides an international forum for the exchange and dissemination of ideas among members and others; and it is the most recognized association concerning a wide range of instructional and educational technology research. Especially, the Research and Theory Division, where my proposal got accepted, is known as a prestigious division to promote the development and advancement of the research regarding the educational technology.

Besides presenting the research, it is always important to get together with old friends and meet new friends in the conference. In this year’s AECT, I met a group of new friends, who are very talented researchers working in the higher education level (see picture 2 above).  Overall, I had a great experience in  this year’s AECT and will definitely come back for next year’s conference.