Topic: A Study of Effectiveness of Social Software Tool – ‘Facebook’ in Learning.

Author: Mehta Devika

Year: 2007-2008

Abstract:
The trend of integrating various Web 2.0 tools in the teaching- learning process is increasing day-by-day. One such Web 2.0 tool is social software known as social networking sites. The researchers were interested in exploring the effectiveness of Social Software Tool –‘Facebook’ in Learning and the students’ participation and communication in Facebook environment. Created in 2004, by 2007 Facebook has more than 21 million registered members generating 1.6 billion page views each day. It has grown by 230% to 785,000 users from India in June 2007. Facebook, enables its users to present themselves in an online profile, accumulate "friends" who can post comments on each other's pages, and view each other's profiles. Also User Profile, Wall and Inbox, Groups, Newsfeed, Notification are some of the features of Facebook.

The researcher aim was to study the social networking tool ‘Facebook as a learning tool and its effectiveness. The researcher also intended to examine the student’s participation and communication in such a learning environment. Facebook was chosen as the tool to be examined over others as the researcher is an active user of the social networking tool ‘Facebook’ and was aware of the increase of its use by people for networking. The main idea of using the social networking tool for teaching the learners is to meet them and teach them in a place they like to be, with which they are familiar with.

Objectives of the research were:

The method used was pre-experimental method, wherein the Single Group Pretest-Posttest design was used for the study. Nineteen students of Master in Educational Technology programme were selected as sample. Pre post, achievement test as well as Opinionnaire was developed as tools. Evaluation Rubric was used to evaluate the interactions among the students on Facebook.

Collaborative learning was effective in teaching students the content; though direct working with other participants was not there they learnt from addition of different perspectives and examples by others.  84 % of the students achieved more than 60% of level of mastery. 21 % have ranked Facebook as an excellent, 63% ranked Facebook as a good tool. 11% ranked it Average tool. The probable reason for their low ranking could be that they were not very comfortable using the tool. Also according to the pre-data collected they are the participants that have not used Facebook as a tool ever and hence it might have been difficult for them to learn the content and the tool at the same point of time. Also the researcher concluded that Facebook can be used as a support teaching and/or communication tool. The overall communication and participation was good. The participants opined that Facebook is a good social networking as well as an effective learning tool.