Oğuzhan Atabek & Soner Yildirim Middle East Technical University Ankara, Turkey

1. ASSOCIATION BETWEEN PRESERVICE TEACHERS’ PERSONAL DIFFERENCES AND THEIR FACEBOOK USE:A COMPARATIVE STUDY IN TURKEY AND THE USA Oğuzhan Atabek & Soner Yildirim Middle East Technical University Ankara, Turkey

2. INTRODUCTION • Social Networking Services (SNS) are being used for educational purposes. • Facebook (FB) is overwhelmingly the most popular SNS (>1billion active users). • FB is promoting its use for educational purposes and developing infrastructure for advanced educational apps. (facebook.com/education)

3. PURPOSE • To shed light on the relationship among personality, motivation, motives, and attitudeassociated with FB usein a cross-cultural fashion. • It is essential to produce knowledge before it becomes a widespread/official tool.

4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS • To what extent personality traits, motivation to use FB, attitude towards FB, and motives to use FB is related to the number of friends on FB? • To what extent personality traits, motivation to use FB, attitude towards FB, and motives to use FB is related to the duration of FB membership? • To what extent personality traits, motivation to use FB, attitude towards FB, and motives to use FB is related to the time spent on FB during a day? • To what extent personality traits, motivation to use FB, attitude towards FB, and motives to use FB is related to the level of privacy of FB profile?

5. RESEARCH DESIGN

6. SAMPLING * 16 of the Turkish respondents were interviewedfor QUAL

7. GENDER

8. AGE

9. INSTRUMENTATION • NEO Five Factor Inventory • CMC motivation scale • FB motives scale • FB attitude scale • FB use scale • Demographics items

10. NEO Five Factor Inventory • Robert McCrae and Paul Costa.1985. 60 items. • Shortened version of NEO PI-R. 240 items. • Based on trait theory of personality • Neuroticism (N) • Extraversion (E) • Openness to experience (O) • Agreeableness (A) • Conscientiousness (C) • Highly used/tested • Multicultural

11. FacebookMotives • Developed by PavicaSheldon. 2008. 38 item. • Dimensions: • Virtual community (Friendship) • Relationship maintenance (Relationship) • Passing time • Removed Dimensions: • Entertainment • Coolness • Companionship

12. Motivation, Attitude and Use • Motivation scale: Spitzberg. 2006. 6 items. • FB attitude scale: Ross et al. 2009. 7 items. • FB use scale: (Adaptedfrom)Ross et al. 4+ items. • number of friends on FB • durationof FB membership • time spent on FB during a day • level of privacy of FB profile

13. VARIABLES

14. DATA ANALYSIS • FactorAnalyses • Exploratory factor analysis • Confirmatory factor analysis • RegressionAnalyses • Ordinal Logistic Regression • Binomial Logistic Regression • Multiple Linear Regression

15. FINDINGS

16. Number of Friends on FB

17. Duration of FB Membership

18. Time Spent on FB During a Day

19. Level of Privacy of FB Profile

20. IMPLICATIONS • General • Personality • Attitude, motivation, and motives • Cultural differences

21. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTITIONERS - 1 • Cultural differences affect the use of SNSs. Therefore, any possible implementation of FB should be carefully planned, developed, and administered by taking culture of the population in the account. • Personal differences affect the use of SNSs.Individuals with all personalities are using SNSs but they are using it in their own way.

22. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTITIONERS - 2 • Relationship is the main motivational factor for using SNSs. Thus, the environment should run on the concept of relationship rather than attaching it to the environment. The users should be provided with relationship maintenance tools for keeping them motivated. • Recreation is the second major factor for the motivation of the users. Thus, without filing the environment with distractive and redundant items, users should be provided with tools for passing time and having fun.

23. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTITIONERS Personality - 1 • Personality is correlated with the way individuals use SNSs. Therefore, the design should embrace all traits of personalities such as providing neurotics with written communication tools and opportunities while providing conscientious individuals with opportunities to help others. • Encouraging strategies are needed to motivate all individuals during the course of the classes. • Even the ones who do not like to use phones and the Internet uses FB and they like it. Thus, many personality-related obstacles are not in effect for the FB. This is a promising fact for the practitioners because personality does not predict the adoption and the use of FB in general. But there are nuances.

24. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTITIONERS Personality - 2 • FB is not somuch new or interesting for highly digitally literate individuals like the open to experience and extraverted ones. • FB implementation should be a changing platform in itself. It should be updated “regularly” and feed the literate and intellectual brains with interesting and charming content on a regular basis to keep them motivated. • Conscientious individuals are too busy with helping others and they are staying behind while trying to answer the questions of others. There should be mechanisms for helping the users. • A help desk full of “practical” information is vital for keeping the conscientious ones in the game. A moderator is needed for running the day to day jobs and helping others. Even though student moderators may help, a non-student moderator is needed.

25. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTITIONERS Personality - 3 • Neurotic individuals are too occupied with written communication and they are not as willing as the others when it comes to face-to-face interaction and real world tasks. • Thus, while providing them with satisfactory opportunities for written communication teachers should assign neurotic individuals to face-to-face tasks and real world activities maybe more than the others to close the gap • Extraverted students may not be early adopters as much as the others. They are occupied with real world activities more than the others. • Practitioners should be aware of their extraverted students and give them time and some room and wait for them to finish their real world activities. Thus, a self-paced and flexible adoption period should be provided.

26. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTITIONERS Attitude, motivation, and motives- 1 • Practitioners should try to develop positive attitude towards and motivation to use of the implementation before beginning to use it or even instructing about it. • Perceptionmanagement is required for the initial part of the implementation . • The developed system should be renowned with its good design, high usability, ease of use, and familiarity. • Developinga good application and a good integration road map (instructional design) before initiating the implementation is required.

27. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTITIONERS Attitude, motivation, and motives- 2 • Stand on the existing relationships (from the “mother” SNS –such as FB) • Provide students with relationship maintenance tools • Provide students with mediums and tools for interacting with each other • Provide students with entertainment tools that can be “socially” used • Provide students with tools that help students to come together in real world • Be used in a way to encourage students to found new relationships • Be used in a way to encourage students be talkative, open minded, and positive.

28. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTITIONERS Cultural differences- 1 • Developers need to have an international perspective to inform populations around the world. • The system should have infrastructure for the translation, adaptation, and customization. • Practitioners in the world should be networked to communicate on the topic. • The application shouldn’t be culturally biased. It should be translatable. • It shouldn’t take certain technology clichés for granted, keeping in mind clichés are culturally biased.

29. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTITIONERS Cultural differences- 2 • The application should have an underlying software infrastructure which enables the practitioners of different cultures to “customize” the app according to the local culture. • The application should be designed as a “layered” and “modularized” structure so that customization should be applied on related levels by not destroying the upper layers. • The application should have a “deeper” level of linguistic customizability so that even the “error messages” can be translated. • Customization procedures should be well documented and easy to handle for end users so that any teacher or moderator –even the students- may contribute without needing higher levels of computer science competence. • The application should provide optional “modules” dor different cultures. Implementers should be able to choose modules more relevant to their cultures.

30. IMPLICATIONS FOR THE PRACTITIONERS Cultural differences- 3 • The application should be open sourced so that professors, teachers, moderators, and students may develop modules for themselves. • A portal for modules is required to procure reusability. • Educational technology is too important a matter to be left to the engineers. Educational technologists and cultural-difference-sensitive professionals are needed to be invited in the design team so that the implementation is less culturally biased from the design. • Designers and developers should know that there are different levels of digital media literacy. Therefore, the interfaces and procedures should be literally “easy” to use and a flatter learning curve is required. Design language should borrow from “already learned” almost universal examples. • The application should be designed keeping classroom in mind. Time consuming tasks and procedures should be avoided, if possible.

31. LIMITATIONS • Since online survey was used for data collection, even though the participants are identified by IP addresses, accuracy of demographic information such as gender and department couldn’t be controlled by the researcher. • Only one type of SNS –FB- was considered while determining the participants to ensure consistency among responses. Thus, the results of FB use were not compared with the results of other SNSs. • FB use scales were limited in scope and especially time us of FB couldn’t be measured. • All participant of this study were students of state university. Students of private universities may differ in their use of Internet and SNS. • Participants of this study were all university students. K12 students may use the Internet and SNSs differently. • This study was a correlational one rather than experimental. Correlations reported in this study does not convey the meaning of causation. • Data was collected in a limited period of time. Thus, information that could be reached in longitudinal periods might not be measured.

32. THE END • Thankyouforyour time…