Like our page: Using Facebook to support first year students in their transition to higher education. A Practice Report
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Lyons, Kenneth
Bridgstock, Ruth S
Carr, Lauren
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Abstract
Facebook is approaching ubiquity in the social habits and practice of many students. However, its use in higher education has been criticised (Maranto & Barton, 2010) because it can remove or blur academic boundaries. Despite these concerns, there is strong potential to use Facebook to support new students to communicate and interact with each other (Cheung, Chiu, & Lee, 2010). This paper shows how Facebook can be used by teaching staff to communicate more effectively with students. Further, it shows how it can provide a way to represent and include beginning students’ thoughts, opinions and feedback as an element of the learning design and responsive feed-forward into lectures and tutorial activities. We demonstrate how an embedded social media strategy can be used to complement and enhance the first year curriculum experience by functioning as a transition device for student support and activating Kift’s (2009) organising principles for first year curriculum design.
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International Journal of the First Year in Higher Education
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3
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2
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© The Author(s) 2012. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Austria (CC BY 3.0 AT) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/at/deed.en_GB), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Education systems
Higher education
Curriculum and pedagogy
Specialist studies in education