Study of Social Networking usage in Higher Education Environment

Social networking, in specific term, access social network application through internet connection, is a new trend in almost organization today. This phenomenon also aroused some debate about impact of employee productivity by using social networking site during office hours. The phenomenon of social networking access also occurred in higher education environment. Despites of debate about negative assumption of social networking impact on productivities, some of campus elements such as students or lecturers using these sites to disseminate information and support the communication among them. Based on this phenomenon, we conducted the research to explore the usage of social networking in higher education environment, especially among lecturers and students, and analyse the impact into teaching-learning activity. Research was conducted in three private universities which have familiar with social networking activities. The research focused on the usage of four kinds of activities such as connecting through facebook, microblogging, instant messaging, and blogging, 300 respondents, responded to the online survey. The result show that most respondents agree for free access into social networking during office hours, and at about 60% respondents using these access not only for entertain but also for information distribution and communication to support teaching activity. The usages vary from task assignment, announcement, class rescheduling negotiation, examination, and so on, which uses some application such as Facebook, Twitter, instant messenger and blog site. This is a policy of social networking access which is most suitable with user behavior in each environment should be proposed.