Negatives Of Facebook

2.4.1 Positive impact of social networking sites on learning experiences and academic performance.

According to Zwart, Lindsay, Henderson, & Phillips (2011), individuals benefit from SNS in several ways: SNS provide a platform for individuals to display their creativity, thus, encouraging greater social interaction via electronic mediums; they provide greater and faster access to information and information sources; they give individuals a sense of belonging among users of the same SNS; they reduce barriers to group interaction and communications such as distance and socio-economic status; and lastly they increase the technological competency levels of frequent users of social media. All these to improved academic performances in the case

For instance, a conference paper by Karpinski (2009) acknowledged that college Facebook users had lower GPA than students who were not engaged in the social networking site. Karpinski confirmed her findings with several hypotheses. She said that perhaps Facebook users spent too much time online and less time studying and this is the reason why they had lower GPA as compared to those students who did not waste time on the site. However, the validity of the study remains questionable as it was not devoid of important shortcomings. Firstly, the sample of students was clearly limited. Secondly, the study made use of few control variables in the analysis. But the main drawback of the study was that it did not rigorously examine counter hypotheses and thus remains a rather exploratory attempt to understand the effect of SNS on learning. On the other hand, Pasek and Hargittai (2009) in turn came up with three additional analyses that used a larger sample of undergraduate students, a nationally representative sample of 14-22 years old, and a longitudinal dataset. They used more control variables including race, socioeconomic status and previous academic achievement variables. The research concluded that there was no signof9cant relationship between Facebook usage and GPA in any of their datasets, thus refusing

Online SNS are filled with incorrect grammar and new lingo. Therefore, students who multitask between SNS and homework may end up making grammar mistakes especially while writing essays and project works. This is because students are unable to draw the mark between the “social networking mindset” and the “academic mindset”. An example of this is the study carried out by Bauerlein (2008). He noticed that students made use of abbreviated versions of words and new lingo on SNS. Hence, it can be said that SNS lead to weaker writing and reading skills which impact on academic