A JOURNAL SUMMARY (2)

TTLC 2013

Facebook: A shift from social to academia

Prema Ponnudurai, Tarosh Thomas Jacob *

American Degree Program, Taylor's University, Petaling Jaya, Selangor

Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences   123 (2014) 122 – 129

Technology has brought broad effect through human life. It not only changed people’s personal lives but also, more importantly, they have also changed the landscape of education. Educators, in this case, is the teachers, have no choice. They have to move their brain into new technology in order to be up-to-date technologically to motivate their students in the classroom.

Ponnudurai and Jacob in their journal try to do research to know the correlation between using Facebook, as one of most visited social- media, and the students’ anxiety in writing. Also, they want to access overall students’ attitudes towards the use of Facebook in the academic domain. As it is generally known that writing skill takes an important part either formal examination such as TOEFL and IELTS or the students’ daily life skill, but many students still have the poor ability in mastering this skill. By implementing this kind of social network platforms, they assumed that this is able to overcome the students’ weakness in writing.

On the third page of the journal, they stated that the theoretical framework which governed in their research was the constructivist learning theory initiated by Vygotsky (1978) which focuses on a rich, active learning environment for effective learning to take place. Besides, further guided theory was the Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model by Koehler (2011).

96 students at a private university in Malaysia from a variety of discipline was used as the participants in this research. The participants were selected from courses which incorporated Facebook in their writing assignments. A questionnaire which was adapted from Shahsavar and Tan (2010) Blog Anxiety Scale used to suit the research’s purpose in measuring writing anxiety on Facebook. In analyzing the data, they worked Pearson’s bivariate correlation test.

In the last part of their journal, they mentioned some findings; (1) the students’ anxiety levels were reduced, their self-confidence increased, (2) the students would prefer social-networking tools to enhance their learning experiences because of the collaborative or interactive nature and informal status that Facebook has in their life.

Regarding the finding of this research, using Facebook is seen as a positive learning tool, but this research did not include the qualitative data to gather more detail data analysis related to content and quality of writing.  Furthermore, this research focused on college students’ level of writing anxiety, another line of research that would be useful is if the students’ levels of academic writing ability are measured as this would possibly increase of the students’ critical thinking skills.