The Use of Facebook and the Context Collapse in Higher Education: A Research on University Students

This study examines how university students use Facebook for the purpose of education, context collapse problems that arises from the aggregation of private life and education life and how these problems are handled. Face to face surveys and online surveys are used in order to identify the students' attitudes, preferences and beliefs about new communication Technologies, social networks Facebook, privacy and context collapse. This research is a descriptive study and aims to give information about the current situation. Findings refer to the positive opinions about using social networks for class assignments and course subjects. But on the contrary , most of the students are not pleased about sharing personal information with the class members. Students preffered to think about Facebook as a social space for interacting with friends and family. Although most of them indicated their pleasure about being friends with instructors, the rate of students who wish to continue this friendship under all conditions is rather low. Also almost half of the students stated that they were not comfortable about being friends with instructors. Students are engaged in activities such as adjusting privacy settings and self censoring in order to avoid context collapse between their social identities and their classroom identities.