Facebook: Where Students are in Charge of their Learning

摘要

Some academics see Facebook (FB) as distracting students from learning activities, while others embrace the environment and create class FB groups wherein they participate actively. Not much is known about the learning that takes place in groups without teachers. Students in a second year studio-based architecture class started their own Facebook (FB) group wherein lecturers were not invited. The aim was sharing resources and ideas and communicating after studio hours, hence the group also had a Dropbox linked to it. We followed a qualitative methodology to analyse how FB contributed to learning. Content analysis of the posts from two year-end examination periods used the Community of Inquiry framework (Arbaugh et al., 2008) for interpretation. True to FB nature, Social presence was the most prominent presence in both years' posts, containing humour and jokes and posts of an affective nature, often associated with stressful periods in their studies that lightened the mood. While teaching presence was the second most salient presence, it was higher in the third year, due to high traffic of administrative type posts. The second year also had a higher number of Cognitive presence posts than the third year, featuring mostly the Exploration construct. Interviews with the selected participants confirmed that the nature of the subjects and projects prompted different kinds of participation in FB, and that the FB group strengthened cohesion in the class. Students felt that they were the owners of the group and that lecturers were not welcome and would have inhibited participation. It was evident that, while students were in charge of their FB group, they were in charge of the resources needed for learning in different phases of their studies.