Learning in a Facebook environment : the writing is on the wall.
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Date
2014
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Abstract
This thesis explores how students learn in a Facebook learning environment. While e-learning
environments offer many new opportunities to engage in learning, these new spaces
are still largely unexplored and the purview of students more than lecturers. This is even
more so the case when it comes to the recent emergence of Web 2.0 technologies and
specifically Social Network Systems. These spaces, originally conceived for social agendas,
are increasingly being applied to a variety of other uses. Recently the application of not designed-
for-learning environments to formal learning has begun to be explored. Most
notable amongst these emergent spaces is Facebook, the largest single website, with over 1
billion users.
Facebook, unlike traditional e-learning environments, represents a departure both
technologically and paradigmatically from what is normally used by universities.
Technologically Facebook is not institutionally hosted or controlled. Paradigmatically it is
built around conversations and not organisation and artefacts. Using an affordance theoretical
framing based on the Latourian concept of actants, the actant action opportunities arising
from the students’ use of Facebook are explored. This analysis revealed the existence of a
dynamic web of interacting affordances that push and pull against each other as students use
the environment. This conversation-based approach to learning shifts learning from correct
content to correcting content, from artefact to conversation, and from prospective to
retrospective sense.
The key tenets of learning in a Facebook environment, as identified through the Latourianbased
lens, exist in the notion of “between”. In addition to the affordance tensions the
students navigate, is the interplay between a learning discourse and a power discourse. The
learning discourse itself is also framed by the interplay between vulnerability and validation.
Students make themselves vulnerable through posts, and thereby open up opportunities to
learn through the validation of subsequent comments. At the same time the learning discourse
is interwoven with the power discourse, where decisions and actions are no longer
autocratically or democratically enacted, but rather homeocratically through retrospective
sanction of small evolving actions. Using Facebook as a learning environment signals the emergence of a new theoretical
perspective for learning, one that is founded, not on organised, deterministic, artefactual
principles, but rather on networks of retrospective conversation-based learning. These new
environments which challenge not only our conceptions of the place of learning, but also our
paradigms of learning, operate in a realm of uncertainty, something that in most respects is
foreign to university learning environments.
Description
Ph. D. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban 2014.
Keywords
Students--Social networks., Online social networks., Electronic discussion groups., Instructional systems., Interactive computer systems., Assistive computer technology., Theses--Education.