Impact of Social Media on Academic Reading: A Study at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana
Keywords:
Academic reading, Social network, Academic performance, Facebook, Skype, TwitterAbstract
Social media is a nice form of entertainment, great for meeting people with similar interests, and can be a very effective business for entrepreneurs, writers, actors, musicians or artists. Social media tools, such as Facebook, Twitter, Skype, LinkedIn, Classmates, Tagged, myyearbook, Meetup, YouTube, Netlog, MySpace, Hi5, Flickr and Photobucket reveal important information about how adolescents and young adults are interacting with one another in the information age. They can be a great home on the web, can help connect with people or reconnect with long-lost friends, and can even help career by making business contacts. Tools like social networking sites, email, instant messaging, video and photo sharing sites help in communication and socialization. Students in tertiary institutions in Ghana often spend a large amount of their free time using social media. This study therefore sought to find the influence of social media on academic reading of students in tertiary institutions. Designed questionnaire were administered randomly to 1000 students from College of Art and Social Sciences, Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. It could be said from the study that social media generally is of great importance to academic reading, because of the various facilities available to students. Its use among some students in tertiary institutions in Ghana, however, does not augur well for their academic performance. This is so because of the preferred entertainment options of social media used by these students
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