The challenges of internal social networking for higher education: a brief review of the literature

Abstract

As social networks become increasingly popular, they have positively changed the business environment by encouraging and providing collaboration opportunities. Social media networks have also enhanced knowledge sharing, innovation, and relationship building, which is growing very fast among enterprises. Many enterprises are assessing the potential of exploiting the commercial opportunities of this technology, which could enhance employee engagement and provide a variety of effects on collaborative work (e.g., relational and personal benefits to organizations). Although these benefits are not only limited to commercial organisations, but also higher education communities are benefiting, as they enable communication, collaboration, and knowledge exchange between individuals. The interest of academic research is in discovering whether the staff and scientific researchers use enterprise social networks as part of their work practices. This focus is motivated by an apparent schism between a need for researchers to exchange knowledge, collaborate, and the aversion to engaging their ideas by communicating through specific digital channels with other individuals. This literature review highlights the influencing factors on the adoption of social networking in higher education, and how these factors differ under different types of social networking, and diverse perspectives in different education levels.