by Derek Morrison, 15 April 2009
In the UK press this week we find Facebook fans do worse in exams (Sunday Times, 12 April 2009) which employs journalistic devices like “researchers have discovered… ” to establish credibility and “findings will confirm the worse fears …” to engage the attention of the anxious parent. Nevertheless, I thought it would be worth tracking back to the research cited and the overview does make for an interesting read albeit, as we would expect, it is rather more circumspect in its conclusions than the press article.
The study cited in the press was a pilot undertaken by Aryn Karpinski a doctoral student at Ohio State University with co-author Adam Duberstein of Ohio Dominican University. The Ohio State University Research News site posted the article STUDY FINDS LINK BETWEEN FACEBOOK USE, LOWER GRADES IN COLLEGE (apparently on 8 April 2009) and refers to the presentation of the research at the annual meeting of the American Education Research Association. Tracing further we find that Karpinski and Duberstein are hosting a poster session tomorrow titled A Description of Facebook Use and Academic Performance Among Undergraduate and Graduate Students (ERA, San Diego, 16 April 2009). Karpinksi and Duberstein correctly identify there may be a range of other variables at work here but those would have spoiled the storyline the journalist wished to follow. I’m more concerned about the risks of passive transfer of tentative findings from another educational culture, albeit English speaking, to the mind of politicians, policy makers and decision makers (includng parents). It may well be that there is a problem with the use, misue, or abuse of our technologies of learning by the so called “digital natives” or “buffet learners”. If so, in order to produce hard evidence, objective and context-based studies over a longer period of time are going to be very important.
