Investigating the use of a social networking site in the facilitation of internationalisation in higher education

Includes bibliographical references.Internationalisation is the movement of people, their belief systems, culture, technologies, education, concerns and economy across geographical borders but where the national higher education system boundaries remain intact. Internationalisation is a growing area in world-wide higher education. To respond to the challenges of internationalisation, universities need to ensure that the service to international students is improved. In order for local and international students to develop into responsible global citizens, they need to understand diverse cultures and be able to relate appropriately to individuals from different backgrounds. Both local and international students, therefore, need to interact while they are on the university campus together. However, international students tend to interact only within their own cohorts, and local students do not see the value in building relationships with international students who may not remain in the country once they graduate. International students leave the university wishing that they had made more local friends and had learned more about the cultures of the country in which they had studied. To respond to the problem of getting local and international student to interact more, a virtual environment on the SNS Facebook was proposed as a safe space for the students, and other key stakeholders, to network. A Facebook Page called IAPO @ UCT was set up by the International Academic Programmes Office (IAPO) - an administrative department at the University of Cape Town (UCT) - in order to provide IAPO stakeholders with an online community in which to interact. The page was set up and monitored over a two and a half year period to see what types of interactions would occur. Actor Network Theory (ANT) was used as the main, high level lens for analysing the interactions on IAPO @ UCT. Certain concepts from the theories of Networking, Social Capital, Social Presence and Social Identity were further used to scrutinise and explain the actions of the Page Poster on IAPO @ UCT. IAPO @ UCT was able to facilitate internationalisation at UCT as there was evidence in the page posts that key stakeholders were interacting with each other online. Supernodes were identified who could increase the dissemination of information on the page, and the value of offline events was highlighted as a means for increasing student participation both off- and online. IAPO branding and inclusion of student assistance in events was suggested in order to increase a sense of belonging to IAPO @ UCT. In addition, the effect of deleting posts and hiding comments was discussed with regard to the building of trustworthiness within the online community