The Importance Of Social Networking Sites

1.3.1 Social networking site (SNS)

Over the past few years social networking has acquired a status of importance among billions of people (Statista, 2016). Especially Facebook and Google+ have been growing in popularity. The Nielsen Company carried out a research in 2009 in which they discovered that more than 67% of all Internet users use social networking sites every month devoting approximately 10% of their entire time spent online being active on social networking sites.

Boyd and Ellison (2007, p. 211) define social networking sites as “web-based services” that are built on three key concepts. First, they allow their users to set up and maintain a public or private profile that ordinarily offers multi-layered options for the user to handle

An aggregator is a website or an application that allows a person to tag blogs of his choosing and when logged in immediately see if there are any new posts on either blogs (Blogarama, 2016). That way, a teacher can easily check students’ progress on their blogs in one place.

Lewis (2009, p. 63) differentiates four types of blogs used for education:

1. A teacher blog: in this type of blog a teacher has more active role than a student since the blog serves as virtual shelf where a teacher puts links to resources for students or assigns homework and projects; it may also function as a place where a teacher shares different resources with other teachers

2. A student blog: it is a blogs in which a student keeps all his writing assignments and where his classmates can write their opinions on them and have discussions about them

3. A class blog: it is essentially a blog for the whole language group that fulfils the same purpose as a student blog

4. A project or topic blog: a blog that is not specified by its users, but it is designed in order to do a project or hold discussion about a topic and when a project is finished, one can delete the blog or start another

Probably one of the best known wikis is Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia that anybody can contribute to (Lewis, 2009, p. 65). It is not regarded as a reliable source of information precisely for the fact that anybody can make a post and it does not have to be true.

A wiki is a type of social media that allows people to create the wiki webpage together, as a group where every user can add or delete information; wiki is built on collaboration of the whole group (Lewis, 2009, p. 65). Hadjerrouit (2012) says that it is the collaboration and contributions of each member that make wikis such a great tool for educations because it promotes learning in a group, from each other which is more effective than each student working