To me, you are now more than just a teacher who grades me: Teacher-student interaction and Facebook

• In Event: Adapting to Change: Facebook as a Constructive Media in the Faculty – Student Relationship

Abstract

This paper looks at how Facebook contributes to student-teacher relationship by exploring how students perceive professors who use Facebook actively and how they interact with them. Students believe that Facebook gives them an opportunity to know their professors better, make it easier to relate to the professor and start a dialogue with him/her, -- thus reducing the power differential between the teacher and student-- and allows them to keep in touch with their professors after graduation. In this paper, I will also discuss my own experiences of having my students be my Facebook friends in addition to gathering and analyzing my students’ responses through an open-ended survey.

Author

• Ece Algan, California State University, San Bernardino