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Engineering student use of Facebook as a social media ‘third space’
conference contribution
posted on 2017-01-01, 00:00 authored by Stuart Palmer, Tiffany GunningTiffany GunningCONTEXT In the context of engineering education, the potential of social media to open new modes of communication, interaction and experimentation between students and teachers has been identified. Facebook (facebook.com) is a popular social network system, with hundreds of millions of users, and examples of its use in engineering education can be found documented in the literature. A systems view of engineering education would typically position social media as a communication space that is either: i) controlled by the university for academic purposes; or, ii) controlled by students for social purposes. An emerging area of social media research is the investigation of student-created Facebook groups as a ‘third space’, between the institutional space of teacher-managed Facebook groups and the non-institutional, student personal space of the Facebook network.
PURPOSE This paper investigates and characterises public Facebook pages and groups relating to engineering at Deakin University to determine if they exhibit the distinctive characteristics proposed in the literature for student-created ‘third space’ Facebook groups.
APPROACH A search was undertaken to locate public Facebook pages and groups relating to engineering at Deakin University, and the posts and comments from those pages were captured. The Facebook data were graphed to visualise the frequency of posts and comments over time. The text content from the posts and comments was analysed using text analytics and the results visualised to show major themes present.
RESULTS Five Facebook pages and six Facebook groups where identified, containing 1484 posts and comments, and more than 51,400 words. Visualising the frequency of posts and comments showed highly variable levels of online activity between the different pages and groups. Text analytics visualisations of the post and comment content showed the distinctive characteristics proposed in the literature for student-created ‘third space’ Facebook groups.
CONCLUSIONS The public Facebook pages and groups relating to engineering at Deakin University were largely student-created, and exhibited the distinctive characteristics proposed in the literature for student-created ‘third space’ Facebook groups. For engineering educators, the pilot investigation documented in this paper offers another method for analysing and understanding the content of online discussion spaces, including student-created Facebook groups relating to their studies, and discusses implications for engineering educators of the emergence of student-created social media third spaces for learning.
PURPOSE This paper investigates and characterises public Facebook pages and groups relating to engineering at Deakin University to determine if they exhibit the distinctive characteristics proposed in the literature for student-created ‘third space’ Facebook groups.
APPROACH A search was undertaken to locate public Facebook pages and groups relating to engineering at Deakin University, and the posts and comments from those pages were captured. The Facebook data were graphed to visualise the frequency of posts and comments over time. The text content from the posts and comments was analysed using text analytics and the results visualised to show major themes present.
RESULTS Five Facebook pages and six Facebook groups where identified, containing 1484 posts and comments, and more than 51,400 words. Visualising the frequency of posts and comments showed highly variable levels of online activity between the different pages and groups. Text analytics visualisations of the post and comment content showed the distinctive characteristics proposed in the literature for student-created ‘third space’ Facebook groups.
CONCLUSIONS The public Facebook pages and groups relating to engineering at Deakin University were largely student-created, and exhibited the distinctive characteristics proposed in the literature for student-created ‘third space’ Facebook groups. For engineering educators, the pilot investigation documented in this paper offers another method for analysing and understanding the content of online discussion spaces, including student-created Facebook groups relating to their studies, and discusses implications for engineering educators of the emergence of student-created social media third spaces for learning.
