Students’ self-presentation on Facebook: An examination of personality and self-construal factors

The present research seeks to extend existing theory on self-disclosure to the online arena in higher educational institutions and contribute to the knowledge base and understanding about the use of a popular social networking site (SNS), Facebook, by college students. We conducted a non-experimental study to investigate how university students (N = 463) use Facebook, and examined the roles that personality and culture play in disclosure of information in online SNS-based environments. Results showed that individuals do disclose differently online vs. in-person, and that both culture and personality matter. Specifically, it was found that collectivistic individuals low on extraversion and interacting in an online environment disclosed the least honest and the most audience-relevant information, as compared to others. Exploratory analyses also indicate that students use sites such as Facebook primarily to maintain existing personal relationships and selectively used privacy settings to control their self-presentation on SNSs. The findings of this study offer insight into understanding college students’ self-disclosure on SNS, add to the literature on personality and self-disclosure, and shape future directions for research and practice on online self-presentation.     

A five-year study of on-campus Internet use by undergraduate biomedical students

This paper reports on a five-year study (2005–2009) of biomedical students’ on-campus use of the Internet. Internet usage logs were used to investigate students’ sessional use of key websites and technologies. The most frequented sites and technologies included the university’s learning management system, Google, email and Facebook. Email was the primary method of electronic communication. However, its use declined over time, with a steep drop in use during 2006 and 2007 appearing to correspond with the rapid uptake of the social networking site Facebook. Both Google and Wikipedia gained in popularity over time while the use of other key information sources, including the library and biomedical portals, remained low throughout the study. With the notable exception of Facebook, most ‘Web 2.0’ technologies attracted little use. The ‘Net Generation’ students involved in this study were heavy users of generalist information retrieval tools and key online university services, and prefered to use externally hosted tools for online communication. These and other findings have important implications for the selection and provision of services by universities.     

Examining the relationship to gender and personality on the purpose of Facebook usage of Turkish university students

This study examined whether the purposes of Facebook usage is associated with gender and big five personalities in a sample of Turkish university students. Seven hundred and fifty one students filled in a set of questionnaires. While males use Facebook to express themselves, meet new people, and store and organize things more, females use Facebook for educational purposes. Agreeable and conscientious people use Facebook to maintain existing relationship more. It was concluded that gender and agreeableness, which is one of the personality types, are significant variables on the purposes of Facebook usage.     

Exploring students’ purposes of usage and educational usage of Facebook

In order to better understand why students use Facebook and how Facebook can be used for educational activities students’ attitudes and perceptions towards purposes of Facebook usage and Facebook educational usage were investigated in this study. Also, theoretical models of the purposes of Facebook usage and Facebook educational usage proposed in literature were examined using the sample of 226 students from University of Belgrade, Technical faculty in Bor. Previous studies have pointed out that there are three underlying dimensions of purposes of Facebook usage that can be indicated as social relations, work related activities and daily activities. Facebook educational usage also includes three underlying dimensions defined as communication, collaboration and resource/material sharing. These hypothesized three-factor models of purposes of Facebook usage and Facebook educational usage were tested on the present sample data using confirmatory factor analysis. The results confirmed hypothesized latent structures and theoretical validity of both investigated factor models. Further analysis revealed that, according to students, collaboration through academic groups (communities) represents the most important value of Facebook implementation in academic activities.     

Using blogging to enhance the initiation of students into academic research

For the net-generation students learning in a Web 2.0 world, research is often equated with Googling and approached with a mindset accustomed to cut-and-paste practices. Recognizing educators’ concern over such students’ learning dispositions on the one hand, and the educational affordances of blogging on the other, this study examines the use of blogging to initiate students into academic research at the tertiary level. It focuses on the experiences of three students from a third-year music class working on their research paper with blog-based supervision provided by the teacher. The course, in a hybrid fashion, combined face-to-face lectures and tutorials with blog sharing and discussion. The students’ individually-owned blogs were specifically used as their research diaries in which they logged in their work in progress, they then received input from both the teacher and fellow students. Based on the researcher’s self-evaluation of the teaching-supervising process, an analysis of the students’ blog discourse, and students’ survey feedback, this article offers useful insights and suggestions for educators interested in either using or researching on blogging as a means to develop students’ research skills and understanding.     

Get out of MySpace!

To understand the student experience on social software, the research aims to explore the disruptive nature and opportunity of social networking for higher education. Taking four universities, the research: (1) identifies the distinction between the students’ current usage of social software; (2) reports on the students’ experience on opportunities and challenges of learning with social software; and (3) introduces principles as a guideline in using social software for learning. Quantitative research methods (web-based questionnaires) were incorporated to investigate the pattern of learners’ usage. Qualitative methods (student interviews) were adopted to clarify and further inform this relationship and their attitudes towards social software for learning. The results demonstrate a massive use of educational technology with distinct divide between the learning space and personal space. Student voices reveal that the central problem of such divide is due to the contrast perception and experience of ‘learning/studying and social life’. We argue that online learning and social personas may overlap but that learning needs to be designed so that it addresses the individual preferences to combine or separate the two domains. The paper concludes with a few principles of learning with social software grounded in students’ experience and Vygotsky’s paradigm.     

Students' perceptions of Facebook for academic purposes

Facebook is the most popular Social Network Site (SNS) among college students. Despite the popularity and extensive use of Facebook by students, its use has not made significant inroads into classroom usage.In this study, we seek to examine why this is the case and whether it would be worthwhile for faculty to invest the time to integrate Facebook into their teaching. To this end, we decided to undertake a study with a sample of 214 undergraduate students at the University of Huelva (Spain). We applied the structural equation model specifically designed by Mazman and Usluel (2010) to identify the factors that may motivate these students to adopt and use social network tools, specifically Facebook, for educational purposes.According to our results, Social Influence is the most important factor in predicting the adoption of Facebook; students are influenced to adopt it to establish or maintain contact with other people with whom they share interests. Regarding the purposes of Facebook usage, Social Relations is perceived as the most important factor among all of the purposes collected. Our findings also revealed that the educational use of Facebook is explained directly by its purposes of usage and indirectly by its adoption.     

Computer mediated communication for social and academic purposes: Profiles of use and University students’ gratifications

The present study approaches the Internet as a social space, where university students make use of computer mediated communication (CMC) applications, i.e. e-mail, instant messaging and social network sites, in order to satisfy social and academic needs. We focus on university students, because they represent one of the most avid groups of CMC users and additionally, because they are expected to carry their perceptions of media with them into the work place and their social life. In order to investigate this issue, we conducted an empirical research using, as a target group, a sample of students from a specific Greek University. Grounded in the “uses and gratifications” perspective, we investigated the various profiles of CMC use by students along with (a) the students’ perceptions about social and academic usefulness of CMC applications, (b) the extent up to which these perceptions are correlated with students’ prior experience with the use of CMC applications, and (c) how both of these factors can predict the frequency of present use of CMC for social or academic purposes respectively. The results reveal that although these three CMC applications constitute “functional alternatives” (media that satisfy similar needs) they are different to the degree of their “functionality” for the gratification of social and academic needs. Furthermore, the degree of CMC use by students is not correlated with the years of CMC experience, but with the profile of use that students dynamically adopt according to their daily needs and preferences. The results provide evidence for the current CMC use by university students and can be useful for the implementation of further academic policies regarding CMC use in Higher Education settings.     

Malaysian Facebookers: Motives and addictive behaviours unraveled

Malaysians were reported to have the most number of Facebook friends, spend more time on Facebook and might be addicted to Facebook as well. This paper explored Facebook usage pattern, motivations and psychological/behavioural factors affecting the users. A focus group study was first conducted to explore motives to use Facebook and symptoms related to excessive Facebook usage. The themes emerging from this were then used in addition to Uses and Gratifications theory and Brown’s Addiction framework to further explore Facebook usage pattern, motivations and behavioural issues among a large group of students. Results show that Malaysian students use Facebook actively, similar to other studies done worldwide. Factor analyses yielded five motives to use Facebook: Social Networking, Psychological Benefits, Entertainment, Self Presentation and Skill Enhancement. As for the behavioural symptoms, Salience, Loss of Control, Withdrawal and Relapse and Reinstatement emerged as the four main symptoms. These results show that in general Malaysian students use Facebook for similar motives as reported in literature. However, it is interesting to note that they also exhibited behavioural symptoms, such as Salience, Loss of Control, Withdrawal and Relapse and Reinstatement due to excessive Facebook usage.     

Understanding adolescents’ problematic Internet use from a social/cognitive and addiction research framework

As Internet usage has become more prevalent among youth, so too has problematic Internet use. Despite the critical role of emotion regulation in the development of adolescents’ behaviors and the role of parenting interactions on their children’s behaviors, little research has examined these links with reference to problematic and addictive Internet use for adolescents. The main goal of this study was to examine these links, based on a sample of 525 high school students (368 males; M = 15.33 years, SD = 0.47) from a predominantly middle and lower-middle socioeconomic community in Seoul, Korea. Results from structural equation modeling revealed that students’ difficulties in emotion regulation was a mediating variable between students’ perceptions of their parents’ parenting behaviors and the students’ Internet use. The findings substantiate the importance of conceptualizing addiction from a social/cognitive theoretical framework and the notion that adolescence is the onset period for many addictive behaviors and so more proactive attention needs to be given to reducing these early negative behaviors. Based on these results, interventions designed to enhance adolescents’ emotion regulatory abilities have the likelihood to mitigate problematic and even addictive Internet use among youth.     

Loneliness,anxiousness, and substance use as predictors of Facebook use

This study investigates the relationships between loneliness, anxiousness, alcohol, and marijuana use in the prediction of freshman college students’ connections with others on the social network site Facebook as well as their emotional connectedness to Facebook. A survey of 229 respondents was conducted at a mid-sized public university to examine these relationships. Respondents were currently living in university dormitories and had an active Facebook account. The study examined the aforementioned predictor variables in relation to Facebook connections strategies and emotional connectedness to Facebook. Results showed that anxiousness, alcohol use, and marijuana use predicted emotional attachment to Facebook. Additionally, loneliness and anxiousness, but not alcohol or marijuana use, predicted individuals’ connections with others using Facebook. The current study adds to the growing body of literature investigating predictors of why individuals become emotionally attached to Facebook and the precursors to connecting with others on Facebook.     

Podcasting in education: Are students as ready and eager as we think they are?

Instructors in higher education are disseminating instructional content via podcasting, as many rally behind the technology’s potential benefits. Others have expressed concern about the risks of deleterious effects that might accompany the adoption of podcasting, such as lower class attendance. Yet, relatively few studies have investigated students’ perceptions of podcasting for educational purposes, especially in relation to different podcasting forms: repetitive and supplemental. The present study explored students’ readiness and attitudes towards these two forms of podcasting to provide fundamental information for future researchers and educators. The results indicated that students may not be as ready or eager to use podcasting for repetitive or supplemental educational purposes as much as we think they are, but they could be persuaded.     

Interactive whiteboards produce small gains in elementary students’ self-reported motivation in mathematics

A treatment/control study (N = 773) was conducted to determine the extent to which use of interactive whiteboard technology (IWB) was associated with upper elementary students’ self-reported level of motivation in mathematics. Students in the treatment group reported higher levels of motivation relative to control students, but the effect was extremely weak. Students with teachers who were more supportive of IWB technology reported higher motivation levels (compared to students of teachers who were less supportive), but this effect also was very small. Claims about the motivation-enhancing effects of the IWB are not baseless, but they appear to be somewhat overstated. Research is needed to determine how IWB-use is associated with academic performance, and also to examine how teachers use the IWB and how this usage could be strengthened.     

Designing an adaptive web-based learning system based on students’ cognitive styles identified online

This study developed an adaptive web-based learning system focusing on students’ cognitive styles. The system is composed of a student model and an adaptation model. It collected students’ browsing behaviors to update the student model for unobtrusively identifying student cognitive styles through a multi-layer feed-forward neural network (MLFF). The MLFF was adopted because of its ability on imprecise or incompletely understood data, ability to generalize and learn from specific examples, ability to be quickly updated with extra parameters, and speed in execution making them ideal for real time applications. The system then adaptively recommended learning content presented with a variety of content and interactive components through the adaptation model based on the student cognitive style identified in the student model. The adaptive web interfaces were designed by investigating the relationships between students’ cognitive styles and browsing patterns of content and interactive components. Training of the MLFF and an experiment were conducted to examine the accuracy of identifying students’ cognitive styles during browsing with the proposed MLFF and the impact of the proposed adaptive web-based system on students’ engagement in learning. The training results of the MLFF showed that the proposed system could identify students’ cognitive styles with high accuracy and the temporal effects should be considered while identifying students’ cognitive styles during browsing. Two factors, the acknowledgment of students’ cognitive styles while browsing and the existence of adaptive web interfaces, were used to assign three classes of college freshmen into three groups. The experimental results revealed that the proposed system could have significant impacts on temporal effects on students’ engagement in learning, not only for students with cognitive styles known before browsing, but also for students with cognitive styles identified during browsing. The results provide evidence of the effectiveness of the adaptive web-based learning system with students’ cognitive styles dynamically identified during browsing, thus validating the research purposes of this study.     

Blended learning in higher education: Students’ perceptions and their relation to outcomes

New information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide educators and learners with an innovative learning environment to stimulate and enhance the teaching and learning process. In this context, novel educational concepts such as blended learning are being developed. In the present paper, we present the results obtained from a blended learning experience carried out at the University of Granada. A total of 17 groups took part, with 1431 students registered for the 2009–2010 academic year. In this study, we use objective outcomes and the students’ perceptions regarding the blended learning activities performed. The study shows that the use of blended learning has a positive effect in reducing dropout rates and in improving exam marks. Moreover, the students’ perceptions on blended learning are interrelated, with their final marks depending on the blended learning activities, and on the students’ age, background and class attendance rate.     

Is the use of information and communication technology related to performance in working memory tasks? Evidence from seventh-grade students

The main purpose of this study was to assess whether seventh-grade students use of information and communication technology (ICT) was related to performance on working memory tasks. In addition, the study tested whether the relationship between ICT use and performance on working memory tasks interacted with seventh-grade students’ socioeconomic level and gender. 275 students recruited from 30 Chilean schools were grouped according to their self-reported use of PC, the Internet, Chat and Video games. To assess students’ working memory performance, they were tested with a digit span test and a visuo-spatial measure. Only one of our two dependent variables reflected a relationship between specific profiles of ICT use and working memory. Higher scores on the digits span test were related to those user profiles combining PC use and video game play, that is, those identified as Full users and as PC and Console Gamers. We did not find an interaction effect of gender and ICT use or an interaction effect of socioeconomic level and ICT use. There are three possible explanations for these results: first, a proclivity of students with higher working memory capacity to engage in technology use; second, an impact on working memory of potential differences in multitasking; and, third, an impact on working memory of video game play. However, these results must be interpreted cautiously since scores on the GEFT, our visuo-spatial working memory measure, were not related to any profile of technology use. As serious educational games become more regularly used at school, previous differences in video game experience become growingly important. Future research must study whether the intended benefits of serious educational games are being mediated by individual differences in previous exposure to video games and other information and computer technologies, with independence of the directionality of the relationship between video game play and working memory.     

Motives for Facebook use and expressing “true self” on the Internet

A survey on 143 university students was conducted to examine what motives young adults have for Facebook use, which of those motives were endorsed more than the others, and how those motives were related to the tendency of expressing one’s “true self” through Facebook use. According to the results, primary motive for Facebook use was to maintain long-distance relationships. This motive was followed by game-playing/entertainment, active forms of photo-related activities, organizing social activities, passive observations, establishing new friendships, and initiating and/or terminating romantic relationships. Another interesting result was that individuals’ tendency for expressing one’s true self on the Net had an influence on their Facebook use motives: The ones with high tendency to express their true self on the Internet reported to use Facebook for establishing new friendships and for initiating/terminating romantic relationships more than the individuals’ with low and medium levels of the same tendency did.     

The effects of incorporating a virtual agent in a computer-aided test designed for stress management education: The mediating role of enjoyment

Drawing upon the Entertainment–Education paradigm, this study evaluated the effectiveness of a computer-aided interactive test designed for stress management education targeting college students. The presence (vs. absence) of a virtual agent incorporated into the interactive test was proposed as the key factor that induces enjoyment and educational outcomes. The interactive test consisted of scenarios describing stressful situations that could occur in college students’ everyday lives. Furthermore, college students could relate the concerns raised by these hypothetical situations to the ways they manage their stress and mental health. After the student’s choice behavior in each scenario, a virtual agent conveyed health-related educational messages via a text-modal dialogue box. Participants who took the interactive test in which there was a virtual agent perceived the test as more educational and entertaining than those who took the test without a virtual agent. Results of a path analysis also revealed a significant mediating role of enjoyment on educational outcomes (i.e., students’ enjoyment of the interactive test mediated the effects of the presence of a virtual agent on their perceived educational value of health information), thus confirming the Entertainment–Education link. In addition, engaging in the interactive test resulted in stress management self-efficacy improvement. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

“Games are made for fun”: Lessons on the effects of concept maps in the classroom use of computer games

Does using a computer game improve students’ motivation to learn classroom material? The current study examined students’ motivation to learn history concepts while playing a commercial, off-the-shelf computer game, Civilization III. The study examined the effect of using conceptual scaffolds to accompany game play. Students from three ninth-grade classrooms were assigned to one of three groups: one group used an expert generated concept map, one group constructed their own concept maps, and a control group used no map. It was predicted that the use of concept maps would enhance the educational value of the game playing activity, in particular students’ motivational levels; however, the opposite happened. Students who used a concept map showed lower motivation on the task relative to their baseline motivation for regular classroom instruction. In contrast, the levels of motivation in playing the game, for students in the control group, met or exceeded their levels of motivation during regular classroom instruction. These results suggest that using a conceptual scaffold can decrease students’ motivation to learn classroom material through game play, perhaps because conceptual maps can (a) focus students’ attention on the difficulty of learning the concepts and on the extrinsic rewards for playing the game and (b) make game play less autonomous, less creative, and less active. All of these can negate the primary property that provides playing its principal potential pedagogical power: fun.     

Is it a tool suitable for learning? A critical review of the literature on Facebook as a technology‐enhanced learning environment

Despite its continuing popularity as the social network site par excellence, the educational value of Facebook has not been fully determined, and results from the mainstream educational paradigms are contradictory, with some scholars emphasizing its pedagogical affordances (e.g., widening context of learning, mixing information and learning resources, hybridization of expertise) and others cautioning against its use for educational purposes. Moreover, systematic reviews about documented educational usage of Facebook as a learning environment are lacking. This article attempts to provide a critical overview of current studies focusing on the use of Facebook as a technology‐enhanced learning environment, with the aim of exploring the extent to which its pedagogical potential is actually translated into practice. Only empirical studies published in peer‐reviewed academic journals with a specific focus on Facebook as a learning environment have been considered for the review. The authors conducted a comprehensive literature search that identified 23 relevant articles that were subsequently analysed according to a simplified list of guidelines. These articles were further analysed and recoded through a set of emerging categories. The results show that pedagogical affordances of Facebook have only been partially implemented and that there are still many obstacles that may prevent a full adoption of Facebook as a learning environment such as implicit institutional, teacher and student pedagogies, and cultural issues. Finally, a broad observation on the implications of the study is developed with some suggestions for future research.