Facebooking among deaf college students : deaf-gain and funds of knowledge

Thesis (Ed. D.)--University of Rochester. Margaret Warner Graduate School of Education and Human Development, 2014.This study explored the use of social media among deaf college students as a way to understand how Social Network Sites (SNS) can be used to assist learning in classrooms of deaf students. These students’ use of SNS is an under-studied phenomenon. Instead, most of the current research on technology used by deaf college students focused on classroom accessibility. Few empirical studies focus on deaf college students and how they use social network sites such as Facebook. Using Deaf-gain and funds of knowledge as guiding lenses, data sources for this study included a demographic survey, seven consecutive daily log charts, field notes from participants’ Facebook pages, and transcriptions both from a focus group and semi-structured individual interviews. Students were recruited from the National Technical Institute for the Deaf, a college of Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. Data was coded and categorized into three themes: information sharing, community participation, and community support