Facebook in an Academic Environment: Advancing Practice from Information-Sharing to Collaboration and Innovation (ICI)

This paper addresses the scarcity of research regarding academic uses of Social Networking Sites (SNS) by demonstrating how a SNS, in this case FB (FB), can engage students academically and help develop synergistic knowledge. The research primary research questions were:  Can Facebook be used as a learning tool to academically engage student?  Can Facebook as an eLearning tool improve students’ learning experience? Building Pollara and Zhu’s (2011) observations that students believe online collaboration assists learning, this paper demonstrates synergistic knowledge development by students as a result of incorporating FB into higher education. Data was collected using student surveys, archival FB information and interviews. This study’s findings support Junco’s (2012) observation that some FB usage can be advantageous to students. The benefits here to using FB in teaching and learning also included the development of educational micro-communities as suggested by Bosch (2009). In this study, FB stimulated critical thinking and engagement in academic debate regarding the module material. Students also engaged beyond just information-sharing, demonstrating high levels of student collaboration and synergistic knowledge development, and ultimately theoretical innovation with the module concepts.