Research Blog 2 - Findings on Facebook in higher education: A comparison of college faculty and student uses and perceptions of social networking sites

Roblyer, M.D., Michelle McDaniel, Marsena Webb, James Herman, and James Vince Whitty. "Findings on Facebook in Higher Education: A Comparison of College Faculty and Student Uses and Perceptions of Social Networking Sites." The Internet and Higher Education 13.3 (2010): 134-40. SciVerse. Web. 3 Oct. 2010. .

     Roblyer, McDaniel, Webb, Herman, and Whitty’s study on Facebook usage as an educational tool determined that students are much more likely to view Facebook as a potential learning tool than educators, but the researchers suspect that this is just a “snapshot” of popular conceptions and that more educators and students alike will be more likely to view Facebook as an effective learning tool in the future. While the survey which provided the data for this study was taken at a “mid-sized southern university,” it is used to represent the relationships educators and students share with technology on a much larger scale.

     The study concluded several things, among them the finding that more students were likely to have Facebook accounts than professors. 95% of students and 73% of faculty had accounts, which demonstrated the overwhelming popularity of Facebook among both college-aged people and older, though the students were still more likely to engage in online social networking. The study also concluded that students were more likely to check both email and Facebook with equal frequency, while professors checked email much more often than they checked their Facebook accounts, which the researchers interpret to mean that students value email and Facebook equally as forms of communication. Social uses of Facebook were reported to be much more common than educational uses among both groups, with “instructional purposes” coming in as the least common use of Facebook in their survey. The researchers propose that Facebook can be used as an educational tool by encouraging communication between teachers and students through a “mentor” model, as well as among students to promote camaraderie and “potential to take action.”

     While I would recommend this article to others interested in Facebook’s usage in an educational setting, I would also encourage the researchers to familiarize themselves with the Facebook platform and the online habits of their target groups a little more. The article includes a study done in 2001 detailing the importance of instant messaging in the lives of teens between the ages of 12 and 17, which was certainly relevant ten years ago, but says very little about the current IM usage among teens because of the fad-like nature of IM programs, which aren’t as popular now that social networking sites have gained control of the internet. The article also says “Facebook seems to have changed this rule since that time,” in reference to entities and groups being allowed to have Facebook profiles, which isn’t true and could have been fact-checked prior to publication. Facebook’s rules have changed to allow for “pages” and “groups,” but “profile” pages are still (and probably will remain) for individual users.