Faceworking: exploring students' education‐related use of Facebook

Social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace have been subject to much recent debate within the educational community. Whilst growing numbers of educators celebrate the potential of social networking to (re)engage learners with their studies, others fear that such applications compromise and disrupt young people's engagement with ‘traditional’ education provision. With these ongoing debates in mind, the current paper presents an in‐depth qualitative analysis of the Facebook ‘wall’ activity of 909 undergraduate students in a UK university. Analysis of these data shows how much of students' education‐related use of this social networking application was based around either the post‐hoc critiquing of…