Facebook, Failing

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.

Australia's Overseas Students Intake Not Affected by Harsh Economy

When times are rough, Australia's recuitment of overseas students is still on the rise. With the latest statistics recording growth of 21.4 % higher over the same time last year, Australia continues to defy the global downturn. Surprisingly this number is on the rise including that the figures for the key month of March commencement period have not be released as well. China was the biggest contributer, which had more than 70,000 students enrolled in Australian universities, colleges and schools in January, followed by Indoa with just under 60,000 students. Deputy Prime Minister, Julia Gillard described the growth as encouraging and showing the strength of a local industry worth $14.2 billion a year. The vocational education sector, which has campaigned strongly overseas in recent years, continued to record the best, up 46.3% compared to the same time last year.