Use of Social Media as a Channel of Information and Communication
CHAPTER ONE
OBJECTIVE OF THE STUDY
The main purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of the rising trend in the use of social media networks by students in seeking information, but to successfully complete the study; the researcher intends to achieve the following specific objectives:
- To investigate the impact of social media on the accessibility of information by student
- To investigate if social media network serve as a reliable source of information to student
- To examine the role of social media in improving the academic performance of student
CHAPTER TWO
Literature review
In the paper Predicting the Future With Social Media’ by Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman. They demonstrate how demonstrate how social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes. They further demonstrates how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be further utilized to improve the forecasting power of social media. In the paper ‗Workplaces and Social Networking’, the authors Andrea Broughton, Tom Higgins, Ben Hicks and Annette Cox talks at length the policy and practice relating to the use of social media by employees. They were guided by the fact that they had already engaged to some extent with the issue of social media, what it might mean for their organization and how they were going to formulate and communicate a policy to staff in two major UK employers. The first organisation was British Telecom (BT), and the second organization was Her Majesty‘s Revenue and Customs (HMRC). In the paper, ‗Predicting tie strength with Social Media’, Eric Gilbert and Karrie Karahalios, d presents a predictive model that maps social media data to tie strength. The model builds on a dataset of over 2,000 social media ties and performs quite well, distinguishing between strong and weak ties with over 85% accuracy.
AN OVERVIEW OF SOCIAL MEDIA
The term ‗Social media‘ refers to the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into an interactive dialogue. In the words of Andreas Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, social media is “a group of Internet-based applications that build on the ideological and technological foundations of Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of user-generated content.” Social media is media for social interaction as a superset beyond social communication. Enabled by ubiquitously accessible and scalable communication techniques, social media has substantially changed the way organizations, communities, and individuals communicate. Social media takes on many different forms including magazines, Internet forums, weblogs, social blogs, microblogging, wikis, podcasts, photographs or pictures, video, rating and social bookmarking. By applying a set of theories in the field of media research (social presence, media richness) and social processes (self-presentation, self-disclosure) Kaplan and Haenlein created a classification scheme for different social media types in their Business Horizons article published in 2010. According to Kaplan and Haenlein there are six different types of social media: collaborative projects (e.g. Wikipedia), blogs and microblogs (e.g. Twitter), content communities (e.g. Youtube), social networking sites (e.g. Facebook), virtual game worlds (e.g. World of Warcraft) and virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life). Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing and voice over IP, to name a few. Many of these social media services can be integrated via social network aggregation platforms. An overview of social media has been shown below-
CHAPTER THREE
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
INTRODUCTION
In this chapter, we described the research procedure for this study. A research methodology is a research process adopted or employed to systematically and scientifically present the results of a study to the research audience viz. a vis, the study beneficiaries.
RESEARCH DESIGN
Research designs are perceived to be an overall strategy adopted by the researcher whereby different components of the study are integrated in a logical manner to effectively address a research problem. In this study, the researcher employed the survey research design. This is due to the nature of the study whereby the opinion and views of people are sampled. According to Singleton & Straits, (2009), Survey research can use quantitative research strategies (e.g., using questionnaires with numerically rated items), qualitative research strategies (e.g., using open-ended questions), or both strategies (i.e., mixed methods). As it is often used to describe and explore human behaviour, surveys are therefore frequently used in social and psychological research.
CHAPTER FOUR
DATA PRESENTATION AND ANALYSIS
This chapter presents the analysis of data derived through the questionnaire and key informant interview administered on the respondents in the study area. The analysis and interpretation were derived from the findings of the study. The data analysis depicts the simple frequency and percentage of the respondents as well as interpretation of the information gathered. A total of hundred and twenty (120) questionnaires were administered to respondents of which 100 were returned. The analysis of this study is based on the number returned.
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION
Collaboration through online mode becomes easy if it is facilitated by social media technologies. For instance , learners can collaborate on team projects . Learners in the same study groups can co-draft documents, spreadsheets, presentation slides and more with Google Docs. Faculty members are cashing on the growing popularity of blogging and micro-blogging by using blogs as additional teaching/learning resources. Social media provide simple, inexpensive ways to organize members, arrange meetings, spread information, and gauge opinion. As more systems emerge, there will be greater capacity for groups to organize and participate in collective action, a hallmark of civil society. Social media can be effective for building social authority; individuals or organizations can establish themselves as experts in their fields, and then they can begin to influence these fields. Thus, one of the foundational concepts in social media is that, with social media, one cannot control one‘s message completely, but one can contribute to discourses. Social media technologies are capable of reaching audiences all over the world.
REFERENCES
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- [2] Acquisti, Alessandro, and Gross, Ralph. (2009). Predicting Social Security numbers from public data. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106 (27), 10975-10980. (journal article)
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