Facebook - Is there anyone that likes it? News article by Debbie

Time Magazine has reported in their article ‘What Facebook Users Share: Lower Grades’ that University students who use social media sites generally have lower grades. They have come to this conclusion through a study undertaken by doctoral candidate Aryn Karpinski at Ohio Dominican University. Whilst the study only involved just over 200 students, a very small snapshot of users, it found that Facebook has negative a negative effect on students’ outcomes.

Karpinski suggests that Facebook isn’t directly linked to lower grades rather there are relationships between social networking sites (SNS) use and lower GPAs. This, Karpinski says, is assigned to the distraction factor. The article goes on to discuss other studies that found that SNS shorten students’ attention span and decrease young peoples ability to understand emotional signals and read facial expressions due to the amount of time they spend wasting time in front of a computer.

Whilst Facebook did not comment specifically about the report they did respond by stating what I firmly believe: that there are other distractions that could adversely affect grades and SNS are not the sole reason for this. Facebook did comment that it is up to parents to decide how much time is spent using this technology.  This sounds like a sensible stance to take. It is undeniable that students spend more time than ever before using social networking sites, but the panic over the effects of SNS could to be premature.  After all, these SNS have not been around for a great length of time and students have always found ways to waste time.

Supporting the views in the Time Magazine article,  the Mashable Social Media blog entry titled ‘For students, what is the Facebook effect on grades?’ discusses the negative effect on student users of SNS. Mashable say that students are prone to lower grades if they use Facebook and other SNS due their addictive characteristics.

Likewise, just this week in the media Edward de Bono, lateral thinking expert and creator of the Six Thinking Hats strategy has  been quoted in an article titled ‘Social Media Makes us Lazy and Stupid’ as saying that there is a danger in social media. He believes that with the information overload due to social media we don’t have to think for ourselves. He believes that we should ‘go offline and get stay in school’.  I wonder why we can’t do both?

It is clear from these three articles that a common theme of Facebook being the ‘bad guy’ is building and this seems to get considerable negative press. As educators we need to encourage discussion about HOW students are using social networking sites. Teacher librarians need to support teachers in how to educate students to be media literate. We also need student education about limiting time spent online. It is only then that we may turn this attitude around and then begin to use these SNS for positive outcomes for our students.

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