| Summary: | Social Network Sites (SNSs) are increasingly influencing the academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and settings. Although SNS has been claimed that it occupied too much of peoples’ daily lives by many researchers and scientists, the fact also demonstrates the growing use of SNS in education area, which proved that SNS has its unique pedagogical significance and potential to foster students’ learning experience. Used and promoted in many countries around the world, SNS is now not only serving as a social network environment (SNE) for people to communicate, but also a platform for academic information exchange and sharing in various contexts. This study aimed at exploring the differences between western and Chinese localised SNS, evaluating the practicability of SNS use in China’s education, and identifying certain problems in the implementation. Referenced by the literature on SNS experiment in teaching, cultural influence and pedagogy value, Chinese SNS would be analysed from comprehensive perspectives.
This study combined two parts, one was the comparison study for four selected SNSs from China and foreign countries, the other was the research experiment conducted with a class of 17 students enrolling in an English educational institution in Chinese mainland, where the students took a spoken English course which lasted for one and a half month. The selected SNSs used in the experiment were implemented to facilitate the teaching and support designed learning process that requires students to explore the use of SNS and motivate them to interact more with peers and teacher off-class while completing the course objectives.
Date collection and analysis conducted mixed methods in this research, the data of this research were collected by different levels of participants’ interviews, observations, recordings and questionnaires that covers the perceptions for research topic, everyday use of SNSs, taken-forgranted interactions and communication among teacher and students in the learning and teaching process.
This research not only justify the practicability of SNS use in China’s education, it also revealed various functions that SNSs could provide in China’s education. In terms of functionality, it could serves as a platform for (a) facilitating presentation and demonstration, (b) developing personal learning record and portfolios, (c) distributing and sharing resources, (d) promoting student-teacher offline interaction, (e) enabling free comment and feedbacks.
Theoretical research would be conducted and practical implementation would also be introduced. Through the experiment, the research would make the best of SNSs in education, which further discuss the special characteristics of Chinese localised SNSs and broaden the understanding of using SNS in education. Pedagogical principles are also discussed. === published_or_final_version === Education === Master === Master of Education
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