Social networks are colonised by a culture of confession that turns teenager privacy into a commodity to achieve recognition and social acceptance. This display accelerates the porosity of the boundaries between the public and the private and feeds surveillance capitalism. The aim of this systematic review is to examine the empirical evidence on…

With the recent COVID-19 pandemic and disruption of campus-based education, the use of mobile social networking applications to supplement formal education has attracted a great deal of attention. Teachers do have opportunities to join students' online groups to share, clarify, and exchange housekeeping information and course-related content with…

The opportunities social media provide for agential expressions of subjectivity and experiential learning, relative to social media's role in reproducing digital-era capitalism, are the subject of keen debate. There is now a burgeoning academic literature which suggests that social media users are, to a greater or lesser degree, alienated by…

Social network sites in general, and Facebook in particular, allow users with common interests to meet, share ideas, and collaborate, creating new forms of informal learning. In order to understand and eventually take advantage of the many benefits that Facebook can bring to the academic world, we need to study its adoption process. The objective…

This study experimentally manipulated the way students submit their assignments and tested the number of new words that are learned in each condition. The results showed that students who submitted their assignments through Facebook learned as much as those who submitted their assignment in a traditional way. In the light of these findings, we can…

The human desire to join and participate in communities can be seen as an attempt to satisfy some of our universal human needs. The theory of communities of practice has been widely used to explain how and why humans participate in multiple communities, and a key requirement of a community of practice (CoP) is that members engage in "joint…

This article is a theoretical study of the self-presentation strategies employed by higher education students online; it examines student identity work via profile information and avatars in a blended learning environment delivered through social networking sites and virtual worlds. It argues that students are faced with difficult choices when…

This article takes its outset in findings from an ongoing research project investigating the use of digital and multimodal resources in teacher education (TE) in Norway. The material studied is mandatory assignments in different courses in TE, asking how teacher students collaborate through digital media in their production of texts for learning,…

Individuals have often used various methods to express who they are and what they represent. Throughout time techniques may have changed but the essential ideas and goals remain the same: how am I able to show the world who I am and what I believe? This study placed that question in the context of the digital world and culture which has been…

The year 2010 was named the Year of Social Media, a technology of communication and for creating and exchanging "User Generated Content". The year 2010 also marked the start of the Arab revolts where, in Tunisia and Egypt, social media served as a critical platform for expressing dissent, organizing, and providing citizen media accounts…

Since its inception at Harvard in 2004, the social network, Facebook, has grown dramatically and spread across the globe. It will soon have 1 billion users and is now operative in over 75 languages. A large percentage of undergraduates are now active on Facebook. Much of the recent literature on Facebook focuses on business applications and how it…

This article is an exploratory study of student behavior using online tools to do project-based work for a library science course at a mid-sized Midwestern public university. The population was 22 net generation students aged 18-24, who were enrolled in an Introduction to Information Resources course. The study was designed to better understand…

As higher education institutions enter the intense competition of the rapidly growing global marketplace of online education, the leaders within these institutions are challenged to identify factors critical for developing and for maintaining effective online courses. Computer-mediated communication (CMC) systems are considered critical to…

The nature of knowledge is being redefined by a new media landscape that allows all participants to be media producers and owners. Without a comprehensive strategy to include Web 2.0 tools and social media practices within schools, powerful new skills will be neither harnessed, nor developed. Despite the challenge to the relationship between…

This article presents a qualitative case study that uses discourse and social semiotic analysis methods in order to examine the rhetorical construction of fictional personas within an online role play used for learning in the college classroom. Of special focus are the differing patterns of semiotic resource use (for example, language and…