The Role of Social Media in Lifelong Informal Learning Among Members of Society

摘要

The current study aimed at exploring the role of social media in Lifelong informal Learning among a sample of social media users through investigating the extent of their use of different types of social media and the various fields of knowledge and sciences acquired through this use. Furthermore, the study aimed at investigating the users' estimation of the both positive and negative roles in lifelong informal learning in addition to the effect of some variables. The study was administered in the summer of 2018 among 210 people chosen by using the snowball sampling method to represent different sectors of the Palestinian society. To collect the required data, an electronic questionnaire was employed. Results revealed that the social media applications were the most used which scored a high degree (87.4 % ) , chatting applications were the second which scored (83 % ,the third was video sharing applications (73.6% ), the fourth was scored by the forums (68.3% ), the fifth was scored by the free sites (67.5 % ) the last and the least was the blogs (51.2%). The study also found that the three highest fields followed by the users included the religious knowledge and intellectual beliefs, education and lastly health and medicine. It was also found that the social media plays a a positive role in lifelong informal learning as revealed by 87.5% of the sample of the study while 84.8 % of the sample stated that social media have a negative role in the society.