The Attitude Towards and the Use of Social Networking in European Higher Education

Author(s):  
Silvia Gaftandzhieva ◽  
Rositsa Doneva

Nowadays, social networking is becoming a more and more powerful tool for students for communication, sharing of information and discussions on various topics. The study presented in this article investigates the extent to which teachers from different European countries use social networking sites in their teaching practice for different purposes and what their attitude is towards the use of social networking in higher education in general. The study is intended to seek clarity on the issues, whether the use of social networks is related to teacher information about social networking sites; their participation in interest groups and research for the use of social networks in education; and whether the results obtained from the survey vary according to the country. For this purpose, the statistical software IBM SPSS Statistics is used. On the other hand, the study explores specific areas of the use of social networking in higher education, with an emphasis on their efficacy.

Author(s):  
Silvia Gaftandzhieva ◽  
Rositsa Doneva

Social networking is becoming a more powerful tool for students for communication, information sharing, and discussions. This paper presents a study, based on a survey questionnaire, which aims to investigate to what extent and for what purposes teachers from different countries from all over the world use social networking in their teaching practice. The attitude towards the use of social networking in higher education in general is examined. The study is intended to seek dependences between the answers related to the above issues and different teachers' characteristics, on the point of view if the teachers are well informed about social networking sites, or whether they participate in interest groups or research related to social networking and higher education. Finally, summarized results of the survey are presented, depending on the continent where the countries of the participants are located.


2013 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 94-100
Author(s):  
D Veerasamy

Social networks have become a way of life for many people who use them to connect and communicate with the world at large. Social media is defined as any tool or service that uses the Internet to facilitate conversations. Facebook is one of the most popular social networking sites (SNSs) and has a total of 55 million active users worldwide with an average of 250000 new registrations per day. After Yahoo, MySpace and Google, Facebook is also the fourth most popular SNS in South Africa. The purpose of the paper was to determine whether social networks have an influence on higher education students’ lifestyles and behaviour. This research was descriptive and quantitative in nature. The sample comprised 386 students studying at the Durban University of Technology (DUT). The results indicated that the majority of the respondents preferred Facebook as their social network of choice. More than half of the respondents indicated that they access their preferred social network five times or more per day. The majority of the respondents agreed that social networks allow for global interaction and that maintaining relationships has become easier with social networking,


Author(s):  
Chingning Wang

“Social shopping” (or social commerce), combining shopping and social networking, is an application of Web 2.0 in electronic commerce to benefit from users’ social networks. This paper explores the development of the emergent “social shopping” and related perspectives. It incorporates comparisons between social shopping marketing and search engine marketing. For example, search engine marketing assumes shoppers are certain of their shopping goal; social shopping marketing assumes shoppers are uncertain of their shopping goals and gather shopping ideas from their peers. In this paper, the challenges in social shopping development are identified, including governing shopper communities and retrieving content from social networking sites. The author concludes that social shopping and e-commerce are not dichotomous concepts. Social shopping can be an evolutionary concept, meaning a singular EC site advancing with social networking functions, or a synergistic concept, meaning EC sites connecting with the other social networking sites to form strategic alliance.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 425-447
Author(s):  
Mikhail Myagkov ◽  
Evgeniy V Shchekotin ◽  
Sergey I Chudinov ◽  
Vyacheslav L Goiko

This article presents a comparative analysis of online communities of right-wing radicals and Islamists, who are considered to be numerous and dangerous extremist groups in Russian society. The online communities were selected based on the content posted on the largest Russian social networking site VKontakte. The goal of this article is to determine the strategy and tactics employed by extremist online communities for survival on social networking sites. The authors discovered that both right-wing radical and Islamist groups employ similar behavioural techniques, with the mimicry of ideologically neutral content as the most common. In addition, every extremist community also applies some unique methods. For example, if there is a risk of being blocked, right-wing radicals tend to shift their activity and communication to the other internet-based platforms that are not under state control; however, Islamists prefer to suddenly change the content of their communities (i.e. by using secondary mimicry).


Author(s):  
Chingning Wang

“Social shopping” (or social commerce), combining shopping and social networking, is an application of Web 2.0 in electronic commerce to benefit from users’ social networks. This paper explores the development of the emergent “social shopping” and related perspectives. It incorporates comparisons between social shopping marketing and search engine marketing. For example, search engine marketing assumes shoppers are certain of their shopping goal; social shopping marketing assumes shoppers are uncertain of their shopping goals and gather shopping ideas from their peers. In this paper, the challenges in social shopping development are identified, including governing shopper communities and retrieving content from social networking sites. The author concludes that social shopping and e-commerce are not dichotomous concepts. Social shopping can be an evolutionary concept, meaning a singular EC site advancing with social networking functions, or a synergistic concept, meaning EC sites connecting with the other social networking sites to form strategic alliance.


Author(s):  
Anastasiia Zerkal ◽  
◽  
Viktoriia Holomb ◽  

The article considers the peculiarities of the formation of marketing communication strategies of the enterprise in terms of digitalization of the economy. The main directions of mass media in the twentieth century are determined and the delimitation of modern social media is presented. The conditions of compliance of the website have been determined so that it can be considered as a part of web 2.0: the ability to independently contribute to the content of the site; User control of your own information and website design -interactive and useful. The influence of digital and mobile technologies on the peculiarities of users' communication, as well as their attitude to the interactivity of social networks is proved. The potential of social networks to support their brands, increase the customer base and promote goods and services of enterprises has been identified. It is determined that due to its popularity, social networking sites have had a significant impact on ways of social communication and as a result have changed the sales channels of enterprises. It is estimated that the number of people using social networks is growing very fast, and at the time of writing, more than 2.62 billion people are using social networking sites. The largest social networks were analyzed: Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram. Their features and advantages for both users and professional marketers of enterprises are determined. It is estimated that in 2021, 71% of the total number of Internet users were users of social networks, and this percentage is projected to increase. The most popular activity among Internet users is social networking, and it has a high level of user engagement, which has a positive impact on the sales of businesses that work with digital marketing tools. The ease and low cost of Internet marketing compared to conventional advertising has proven that businesses in all sectors of the economy can more effectively reach their target audience, and social networks help influence other potential customers, and allow businesses to get useful feedback on their product or service. Ultimately, this leads to improved products / services and customer engagement, ie improves the company's marketing communication strategies in today's digital economy.


2013 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen M. Mutula

Background: With the growing adoption and acceptance of social networking, there are increased concerns about the violation of the users’ legitimate rights such as privacy, confidentiality, trust, security, safety, content ownership, content accuracy, integrity, access and accessibility to computer and digital networks amongst others.Objectives: The study sought to investigate the following research objectives to: (1) describe the types of social networks, (2) examine global penetration of the social networks, (3) outline the users’ legitimate rights that must be protected in the social networking sites (SNS), (4) determine the methods employed by SNS to protect the users’ legitimate rights and (5) identify the policy gaps and technological deficiencies in the protection of the users’ legitimate rights in the SNS.Method: A literature survey and content analysis of the SNS user policies were used to address objective four and objective five respectively.Results: The most actively used sites were Facebook and Twitter. Asian markets were leading in participation and in creating content than any other region. Business, education, politics and governance sectors were actively using social networking sites. Social networking sites relied upon user trust and internet security features which however, were inefficient and inadequate.Conclusion: Whilst SNS were impacting people of varying ages and of various professional persuasions, there were increased concerns about the violation and infringement of the users’ legitimate rights. Reliance on user trust and technological security features SNS to protect the users’ legitimate rights seemed ineffectual and inadequate.


2018 ◽  
Vol 57 (5) ◽  
pp. 1131-1159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix N. Koranteng ◽  
Isaac Wiafe ◽  
Eric Kuada

This article investigates how students’ online social networking relationships affect knowledge sharing and how the intensity of knowledge sharing enhances students’ engagement. It adopts the social capital theory as the basis for investigation, and the partial least square structural equation modeling was used to examine the hypothesized model. Responses from 586 students in higher education were analyzed. The findings provided empirical evidence which contradicts the argument that students perceive social networking sites as an effective tool for learning. Also, contrary to previous studies which posit that knowledge sharing impacts engagement, it was observed that there is no relationship between the two. However, as social networking sites differ in terms of member behavior norms, it is envisaged that if a similar study is conducted and limited to a specific academically inclined social networking site such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate, Mendeley, and so on, different findings may be observed.


2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-303
Author(s):  
Ghozian Aulia Pradhana ◽  
◽  
Syaifa Tania ◽  

This study aims to reveal how hyperreality is reflected in using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on social media. The death of an African-American, George Floyd, that involved white police, has sparked outrage and demonstrations in many U.S. states. Issues pertaining to racism sparked in relation to the event, and many people protested demanding justice. The demand for justice then went into a wave of massive global protests both in offline and online realities—the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag was widely used on social media when protests were held. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag even became a trending topic on several social media platforms, as if everyone was concerned about the issue and aiming for the same purpose. However, we might find several posts that neither reflected nor were related to the case. Some social media users put the hashtag even though their content substance was not related. This phenomenon then led to a condition of hyperreality in questioning reality from a simulation of reality. The method used in this study is content analysis which measures the sentiment of comments on Twitter and Instagram. The study found that social networking sites mobilised online movements even though they were not directly related to the #BlackLivesMatter movement. On the other hand, hashtag activism reduced the true meaning of the social movement. Therefore, the hyperreality in #BlackLivesMatter could not be seen any longer as a form of massive protests demanding justice and ending violence, but merely to gain more digital presence on social media. Keywords: Black lives matter, movement, social media, hyperreality, hashtag activism.


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