How Facebook Might Foster a Community of Inquiry | W10 Q2 | Forum

One aspect of my current research involves student-student and student-teacher relationships and interactions in virtual settings. The Asterhan and Rosenberg (2015) article directly addressed virtual student-teacher interactions through the use of Facebook. I use the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework in my research, which posits that “teacher presence” helps to facilitate discourse between students, which in turn is an important driver of “social presence” – the interpersonal relationships students form around academic content (Garrison, Anderson, Archer, 2000). Asterhan and Rosenberg examined how the use of Facebook groups impacted the relationships between teachers and students finding that the use of Facebook fostered increased interaction between teachers and students, and increased collaboration between students. Translated into a CoI framework this supports the notion that Facebook may increase teacher and social presence in online courses by providing an additional avenue for interaction to occur between participants in a community of inquiry.

The Asterhan and Rosenberg (2015) piece is the first in the course to directly and substantially address Facebook’s role in fostering teacher-student interactions in secondary school settings. This particular study is interesting because it was conducted in Israel after a governmental ban on the use of social networking sites as a communication tool between teachers and students after fears such communication may lower the status of teachers. Thus, the study is in some ways a reactionary response to backlash against Facebook and other social networking sites as appropriate for use in formal educational settings. However, the goals of the study are similar to others in that it seeks to identify the advantages and disadvantages of social media use in schools through the use of multiple methods of data collection (surveys and interviews). Numerous other studies have examined these questions, but few have focused on secondary school teachers.