Abstract

The emergence and growth of social networking sites (SNSs) has been extensive and widespread over the past few years. Yet despite their popularity, recent media coverage has drawn attention to some major concerns associated with using these sites by legal minors, most notably, privacy and safety issues. As a result, many educational institutions have banned the use of SNSs. Given the academic potential and benefits that SNSs have to offer, this paper aims to address the integration and use of an alternative, education based SNS called in Ning in Education and advocates its importance for learning. Moreover, this paper will provide evidence detailing how alternative, education-based SNS, such as Ning in Education, can provide an enhanced venue for learning while simultaneously minimizing educators’ concerns over student privacy and safety as compared to popular, commercially based SNSs, such as Facebook or MySpace. Findings from this study are supportive of the uses of SNSs in distance education course.

Citation

Holcomb, L., Brady, K. & Smith, B. (2010). Ning in Education: Can non-commercial, education-based social networking sites really address the privacy and safety concerns of educators?. In D. Gibson & B. Dodge (Eds.), Proceedings of SITE 2010--Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education International Conference (pp. 528-531). San Diego, CA, USA: Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved February 26, 2021 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/33392/.

Keywords

• facebook
• networking technologies
• social networking