SCOPE AND IMPLICATIONS OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN THE CONTEXT OF HIGHER EDUCATION: REVIEW OF RESEARCHES

Social media are extremely popular online destinations that offer users easy ways to build and maintain relationships with each other, and to disseminate information in an activity referred to as “social networking”. Students, teachers, parents and organisations, in increasing numbers use tools available on social networking sites, to communicate with each other in a fast and cost effective manner. The use of social networking sites to support educational initiatives has also received much attention. Popular social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, WhatsApp, Flickr, ResearchGate, YouTube, LinkedIn etc. demonstrates an emerging opportunity for students and educators within formal higher education contexts to share ideas, celebrate creativity and participate in an environment which offers immediate feedback from other members of the specific network. The present paper offers an introduction to social networking and emergence and growth of popular social networking sites. This is followed by an extensive review of researches on social media in the context of higher education. The scope and implications of social networking in educational context have also been discussed at length. Finally, major problems and issues involved in the use of social networking have been brought out. The inherent challenges and promises to optimize the use of social media in the context of higher education still require concerted efforts of educational technologies and academicians as conclusive evidence on the effective use of social media for attaining objectives of higher education is lacking at present