The Use of Social Media for Academic Purposes in Student’ Learning Process

Elda Tartari

doi:10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n2p393

Abstract

Social media has a great impact on student’s lives. They spend a considerable part of their time on these pages. Social media includes social networking sites (SNSs), virtual gaming sites, video sites, projects sites and blogs. Millions of students are using these Web 2.0 tools worldwide, there hasn’t been much research regarding the educational use of social networking. The purpose of this study is to investigate attitudes toward the use of social media in learning process. The findings suggest that social media and social network sites in particular can be very useful as an educational tool. Students using SNSs as a supplement to their curriculum showed that they loved spending time on SNSs, and exercises, videos and other sharing in group are useful for their academic purposes. The paper concludes with suggestions for improving academic purpose and it highlights the fact that every educator must regard how their current teaching standard can be improved or how they could perhaps be replaced because of a prevalent web. DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2015.v4n2p393

Highlights

Social media has a great effect on people’s lives
Students that participated in this study were split between these devices: 80 of them use mobile devices, 43 of them use their smart phones and PCs to access their accounts and 57 of them use only the PCs. 65% of the students who use social media thought that social networking sites can be successfully used in education to hold up especially foreign language learning
We can say that social media is widely used by students to help their study process

Summary

Introduction

Social media has a great effect on people’s lives. The association of social media is the social interaction, which gives the participants the possibility to share opinions, thoughts, and knowledge in a global forum where time and place are insignificant (Carlsson, 2010). The Web 2.0 platform is “a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. It refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.” (Anonymousa, 2007). The technology and Web 2.0 tools are encouraging of knowledge construction, immersion in a foreign language, and interactivity through sites. While Harrison & Thomas (2009) said in their study that the use of social networking sites to learn a foreign language has been little investigated, and the pedagogical assumptions behind their use have been called into question

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion