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Team Communication via Facebook: Success or Failure?
Last modified: 2012-07-12
Abstract
The implementation of advanced technological solutions in education has the potential to become a valuable resource to support students’ communications and collaborations. One possible solution is the social networking site Facebook. Many college students use this site as an integral part of their daily communication activities. Many researchers, consequently, tried to investigate the potential positive use of Facebook at university level, which is focus of the literature review of the paper. As effective communication is crucial to the success of teams, we wanted to examine students’ perception of Facebook as medium of communication between team members in a project-oriented course. Examination of the communication channel included assessment of communication flow, communication quality and communication satisfaction from student point of view and from teachers’ point of view in terms of quality of students’ output. Our results show that Facebook is perceived as good as other non-Facebook media of communication in terms of bidirectionality, formality and communication quality between team members. Our research also revealed that Facebook had better results in terms of frequency but did not have better results in terms of performance outcome and students satisfaction.