(1472) FACEBOOK IN THE UNIVERSITY ENVIRONMENT: TO WHAT EXTENT DO STUDENTS MAKE USE OF SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES AND INSTANT MESSAGING APPLICATIONS FOR UNIVERSITY-RELATED WORK AND STUDYING?

摘要

Social Networking Sites (SNS) and Instant Messaging (IM) applications have become very popular inthe last decade. This has brought about much academic debate on the usefulness of such sites andapplications in different areas and work environments. The university environment is one such, as agap seems to exist between the use students make of SNS and IM applications and the limited, oreven lack of, official implementation and institutional use of them by lecturers and learning institutions.This paper aims to investigate to what extent university students make use of SNS and IM in relationwith learning and university-related work. In order to do so, a survey was conducted among 115university students. This paper focuses mainly on the SNS Facebook, as it is the most popular SNS inthe world, both in terms of number of profiles and global penetration. However, students were alsoasked about their use of other SNS and IM applications in relation with university-related work andstudies. Results show that answering surveys posted by other students (for their university work),being part of groups created for doing university work or studying and sharing university-related linksare some of the education-related activities that students most perform on Facebook. AlongsideFacebook, WhatsApp, YouTube and LinkedIn are the most popular SNS or IM applications when itcomes to studying, doing and organizing university-related work. Some differences among male andfemale students can be inferred from the data though, although it was not the aim of this study toexplore such differences and further research would be needed. The paper concludes that universitystudents make good and ample use of SNS and IM applications for education-related purposes and arecommendation for lecturers to adopt these tools is made.