Volume Two - Academic Conferences

Andrik Rampun and Trevor Barker
could create a constructive sense of competition because they will strive to get more “kudos points”
by participation in discussion or contributing and sharing materials with others. It is possible however
that this competition might be counter-productive for some learners. We will investigate this issue in
future research. This competition could potentially increase a learner’s participation and engagement,
not only in a particular group discussion but in the whole community. By involvement with more
groups there are likely to be more interactions, leading to a greater spectrum of views and diversity of
opinions, leading to a richer "debate". Diversity of expressed views may give students more
alternative personal routes to understanding and learning and options to choose those which are the
best for them. Therefore, this tally with an article entitled “diversity within unity” by Banks et al. (2001)
the University of Washington, arguing that learning occurs when there is diversity in the environment.
In light of these findings, it will clearly be desirable to enhance the evaluation of the application by
using a greater number of participants than the ten participants in this study. In conclusion, this study
strongly suggested that social networking has the potential to revolutionise the current eLearning
approaches such as portal based eLearning, blogs, wikis and forum discussion. In fact, social
networking technology has the potential to shift the learning process from "formal" to "informal"
making learning a more relaxed, pleasurable and interactive process. This would allow students to
schedule and plan a learning period so that their session is tailored for a specific time allocation. This
is in accordance with one assumption related to the cognitive theory of multimedia learning which is
due to the capacity of working memory; learners can only process a limited amount of information in
each channel at one particular time (The eLearning coach, 2010). Other than that, the authors
consider that the social networking approach allows learners to develop their knowledge for
themselves as he or she learns in a constructivist way.
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