Examining university's student's use of social media for education

Abstract

The majority of university students worldwide use social media in their everyday life. However, the extent to which students use such online technology for educational purposes is worth exploring. This paper reports on a research that examines university students’ current and potential educational use of social media with an emphasis on students’ learning processes with social media as supportive learning tools. The research also relates students’ learning to five major claims of social media – user generated content (UGC), prosumer, co-creation, sharing, and communities. Before addressing students’ use of social media for learning, this research first examines what students do with social media in both non-academic situations and university-related educational contexts. It then examines their perceived usefulness of various social media activities for academic and non-academic contexts. Various approaches in applying social media to facilitate students' work will also be discussed in this paper.