Abstract:
Although social networking sites (SNS) are increasingly popular among students, their
academic application is unfolding on trial basis and best practices for integration into
mainstream teaching are yet to be fully realised. More importantly, is the need to
understand how these sites shape academic relations and participation of heterogeneous
students, particularly in resource-constrained African environments. The speculation about
meaningful educational uses of SNS possibly rests on the complexity of grasping the
multiple horizontal and vertical interactions that unfold via these sites. This study examines
academic relations on Facebook with a view to generating a nuanced account of how power
is reinforced or disrupted in interactions mediated by Facebook. The paper analyses the
Facebook wall and forum postings of 165 first year Information Systems students and
employs Anderson’s model of six types of interactions to explore student experiences of the
enactments of social power in Facebook engagements. Issues relating to power that
emerged from Facebook interactions concerned asymmetrical engagements based on
gender, breaching of hierarchical boundaries, compulsive academic use of Facebook,
perceptions of vertical surveillance, lecturer and student projection of themselves and
impression management. The paper recommends that learning with and from Facebook
demands identification of leverage points in various stages of Facebook interaction.
