The use of social media in collaborative learning among university students

Abstract

In the field of education, the media-involved innovation has attracted lots of attention. This project locates on an undergraduate module to discern two research questions as 1) the discourse roles of students’ contribution and 2) social media platforms’ usage during collaborative learning. The participants of this project are two groups of undergraduates between the Year 3 to Year 4 who having the same internship module in the year of 2008 and 2013 separately. They are required to write weekly logs during the internship when working in practice organizations. Moreover they should reply 1 to 2 posts of others’ logs every week. Because of the time limitation, data from only 8 original posters’ logs are assembled as the analyzing content (That is, there are totally 16 students (8 from Blog and 8 from Facebook) who write logs. Because all of those logs and replies will be collected as the analyzing data for this project, therefore the exact involved number of participants is 19 from Blog with 384 posts and 28 from Facebook with 515 posts)). With the support of Dedoose 5.0.11, the methods of content analysis and code schema will be applied for further discussion. The framework of the code schema in this project are formulated based on Weltzer-War (2011)’s literature review in this field. There are three dimensions of the framework: 1) Social interactions, 2) Thinking purpose and 3) Thinking development. In each dimension there exist several categories to describe participants’ activities in detail. As the results of this project, discussions are conducted in three aspects: 1) top three categories of each dimension, 2) post quality and 3) participants’ social interactions to identify there do exist different impacts on students who holding the same module in different social media platforms (Blog and Facebook).