F is for Fail and in this case, is also for Facebook as well. It has become so easy for college students to get caught up in hours of online procrastination thanks to Facebook. You may have an assignment due in an hour and get caught up scrolling through various Facebook accounts or photos of someone you haven't seen since elementary school. Academic research has concluded that on many such students, Facebook is having a detrimental effect of university results. Researchers from the US have found that students prone to accumulating friends, uploading photographs, chatting and "poking" other on Facebook may spend as little as one hour per week to their studies and academic work."Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon," said Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University. Her study, conducted with a colleague at OSU, questioned 219 US undergraduates and graduates about their study practices and general Internet use, as well as their specific use of Facebook. They found that 68% of students who used Facebook had a significantly lower GPA then those who did not have an account with Facebook or use the site at all.
It is all to easy to waste precious study hour time and click aside to check Facebook messages. Rather than addressing this issue, some Australian university students have instead started setting up Facebook support groups to discuss how the site adversely affects their university grades. Which is quite ironic, in the sense that, rather than not using the social utility site or shutting their computers off they are simply creating anti-Facebook groups, using the actual website. The Sydney University-based group called "I want to sue Facebook if I fail university" has almost 1000 members who cite the social networking site as the primary cause for an increasingly amount of people failing universities. Thanks to the latest tech-savy invention of Facebook applications for Blackberries and iPhones there is even more tendency to simply stay on the website for hours at the palm of your hand.
While Facebook simply adds to the list of ever increasing distractions for college students, the computer as a whole has made college life infinietly easier to get through. The wealth of knowledge packed into this thing called the internet is phenomenel to say the least. All those late night steps to the library or what used to be the computer lab are now obsolete. The distractions we would have found at the library or even on the way, in the form of human faces are gone as well. We can now simply research an entire paper online, avoid the distractions of campus and get it done quicker.
ReplyDeleteI believe Facebook is simply another excuse that students have to procrastinate their tasks. We will always find something to distract our study time when we choose not to study. That has always been the case. So what is the answer then? One study suggests that the less time our instructors afford us to complete a task, the more focussed we will be on it. If you are given two weeks to prepare a paper, won't you contemplate the assignments for 13 days? I did. If given two days to complete a task, won't you simply put your nose to the books and complete it? If you want to stay in school you will.
Long after you graduate college, you will be forced to prioritize your time. Your choices will be similar as well, so it won't seem that foreign to you. You must choose between work assignments, family, spouse, significant other, and of course Facebooking, Myspace, Twitter, and a myriad of new social networking sites coming out all the time. You may even choose some day to actually go outside your home and see the real faces walking the streets? I know this last one is a stretch in this have it now computer world, but it's possible. Tonight, for instance, I have chosen to check out an interesting blog on media in Australia. Nice work Mike!
I agree completely, esspecially about how valuable the internet as a whole is to college students these days. I also agree that there will always be something there to distract one from accomplishing an assignment whether it be due in 2 weeks or 2 hours. Yeah it is amazing how distractions such as social networking sites lets you in a sense ignore your surroundings and simply forget about the real world and whats around you. Thanks for checking out my blog, I'm glad you enjoyed it! Mike
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