This Thursday two epic events kick off:

1. The 2014 World Cup (3 pm CT)
2. My FINAL Dissertation Defense (2:30 pm CT)

Conveniently, I found this @PhDComics cartoon (circa 2010) shared in my network:

c/o PhD Comics: World Cup vs. PhD

Here is my dissertation title and abstract:

Pasquini, Laura A. Organizational Identity and Community Values: Determining Meaning in Post-Secondary Education Social Media Guideline and Policy Documents. Dissertation Abstract, Doctor of Philosophy (Applied Technology and Performance Improvement), August 2014.

With the increasing use of social media by students, researchers, administrative staff, and faculty in post-secondary education (PSE), a number of institutions have developed guideline and policy documents to set standards for use. Social media platforms and applications have the potential to increase communication channels, support learning, enhance scholarship, and encourage community engagement in higher education. As social media implementation and administration has developed in the PSE sector, there has been minimal assessment of the substance of social media guideline and policy documents (McNeil, 2012).

The first objective of this research study was to examine an accessible, online database (corpus) comprised of 24, 243 atomic social media guideline and policy text documents from 250 PSE institutions representing 10 countries to identify central attributes. To determine text meaning from topic extraction, a rotated latent semantic analysis (rLSA) method was applied (Evangelopoulos & Polyakov, 2014). The second objective of this investigation was to determine if the distribution of topics analyze in the corpus differ by PSE institution geographic location. To analyze the diverging topics, the researcher utilized an iterative consensus-building algorithm (Winson-Geideman & Evangelopoulos, 2013).

Through the maximum term frequencies, LSA determined a rotated 36-factor solution that identified common attributes and topics shared among the 24,243 social media guideline and policy atomic documents. This initial finding produced a list of 36 universal topics discussed in social media guidelines and policies across all 250 PSE institutions from 10 countries. Continually, the applied chi-squared tests, that measured expected and observed document term counts, identified distribution differences for the content related factors between US and Non-US PSE institutions.

This investigation offered a concrete analysis for unstructured text data dealing with of social media guidance. This resulted in a comprehensive list of recommendations for developing social media guidelines and policies, and a database of social media guideline and policy documents for the PSE sector and other related organizations that guide social media use and implementation.

Additionally, this research stimulated important theoretical development for how organizations socially construct a semantic structure within a community of practice (Wenger, 1998). By assessing the community of practice, comprised of PSE 250 institutions that direct social media use, a corpus of documents created unstructured data to evaluate the community. The spontaneous participation and reification process of the social media guideline and policy document database reaffirmed that a corpus-creating community of practice can instinctively form a knowledge-sharing organization that provides meaning, values, and identity. These findings should stimulate further research contributions, and provide practitioners and scholars with tools to measure, understand, and assess semantic space for artifacts developed within a community of practice in other industries, organizations, or distributed associations.

Updates to my dissertation research methods, social media guideline and policy document database, and more can be found on my dissertation website:

http://socialmediaguidance.wordpress.com/

If you are interested in attending my dissertation defense, my meeting is scheduled:

Thursday, June 12, 2014 at 2:30 pm at Discovery Park, Department of Learning Technologies (Room G150)

Side note: I really hope a certain football fan I know attends my defense. I am sorry these two events were timed so close together. 🙂

References

McNeill, T. (2012). ‘‘Don’t affect the share price’’: social media policy in higher education as reputation management. Research in Learning Technology, 20.

Wenger, E. (1998). Communities of practice: Learning, meaning, and identity. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

Winson-Geideman, K., & Evangelopoulos, N. (2013). Topics in Real Estate Research, 1973-2010: A Latent Semantic Analysis. Journal of Real Estate Literature, 21(1), 59-76.

Evangelopoulos, N., & Polyakov, S. (2014). Indexing with rotated latent semantic dimensions. Manuscript submitted for publication.