MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING APPLICATION FOR ACADEMICS AND FOR COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
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MOBILE SOCIAL NETWORKING APPLICATION FOR ACADEMICS AND FOR COLLABORATIVE LEARNING
Chapter One: Introduction.
Background of the Study
Social networking began when man first appeared. Man is a social being who will always find it difficult to function without interacting with others around him.
Many years ago (20th century and lower), people communicated and interacted with one another by various ways such as postal service, telegraph, and so on. Following the evolution of the internet in the 1970s, people utilise it to connect or interact with one another, particularly in established organisations such as the United States Military.
Only in the recent several decades has the usage of social networking services become a global phenomenon, particularly among young people (Horizon, 2009). Boyd and Ellison (2007) define social networking services as web-based services that enable individuals to:
Create a public or semi-public profile within a constrained system
Create a list of other users with whom they have a connection.
View and navigate their list of connections as well as those made by other users in the system.
The manner in which these elements are implemented may differ from site to site. Social networking began with the Bulletin Board System (BBS), and it was frequently maintained by amateurs who carefully cultivated the social aspects and interest-specific nature of their projects, which were typically technology-related in the early days of computers.
However, other forms of social connection existed long before the Internet became widely known. One such alternative was CompuServe, a service that began in the 1970s as a business-oriented mainframe computer communication solution but was made available to the public in the late 1980s.
CompuServe members could share files and access news and events. However, it also provided something unique: real interactivity. However, if there is a true antecedent to today’s social networking sites, it was most likely created under the AOL (America Online) umbrella.
In many respects and for many people, AOL was the Internet before the Internet, and its member-created communities (complete with searchable “Member Profiles,” in which users would disclose relevant data about themselves) were arguably the service’s most exciting, forward-thinking feature. Other social networking apps, such as Friendster, LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, were created between 2002 and 2007.
Social networking grew more intriguing and exciting, particularly among young people, after a number of mobile social networking applications were developed, such as 2go Messenger (which was primarily used in African nations), which was founded in 2007 as a communication tool for university students.
Despite the fact that it later shifted away from the students-only approach to focus on expanding African markets. Another mobile social programme is Whatsapp Messenger, an instant messaging service for cellphones that functions on a subscription basis.
This app was first released in 2009. The app is ranked in the top 20 of all apps in the App Store due to characteristics such as platform support (it runs on a variety of mobile devices) and functionality such as sending photographs, videos, and audio media messages in addition to quick text chatting.
These social networking applications, both web-based and mobile-based, have aided in the enhancement of collaborative learning and view sharing among students of various levels and youths in general, by forming various groups where people of similar interests meet to share and update their views and responses to events that affect them as a whole.
With the help of these social networking programmes in creating separate groups within them, the hope of adopting online collaborative learning as an official medium for academic studies in universities grows stronger by the day.
Recently, some teachers have chosen a system for distributing lecture materials and quizzes, such as creating a closed group on Facebook. Students can also build their own private groups on Whatsapp for collaborative learning and information exchange, and these two different systems are constantly improving.
Other applications built specifically for academic purposes include “Classroom Salon,” “Google Classroom,” and “KDSeClassrom,” among others. As previously said, these applications support the majority of the functions that Facebook and Whatsapp do.
They also offer additional technical support, such as teacher evaluations on student involvement in class, a tool for uploading assignments and quizzes and submitting them, etc.
Statement of the Problem
Social networking programmes have been greatly developed with the goal of employing them as one of the essential instruments for learning in schools. Thus, several established institutions and lecturers have already begun using them to create online classrooms, administer quizzes, upload electronic lecture notes, make notices, and so on.
Looking at the applications that have been developed so far for this purpose, there is an urgent need for such applications to meet and support more technical functionalities, making their use more flexible and acceptable in academic fields
thereby supporting traditional classrooms and improving collaborative learning. Some of the main technical functionalities that have still to be implemented in such apps include:
Proper authentication of members that use the application as a group or class
improved information system for announcements.
Students in a group receive instant notification of information via SMS.
Creating a separate column for lecturer posts and student comments, contributions, and questions in class.
The application allows for direct submission of assignments and quizzes.
Customisation of lecture rooms for each course offered by a specific group of students.
Mechanism for cautioning and managing student behaviour on the forums.
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