The Use of a Social Networking Site in the Facilitation of Internationalization in Higher Education: A Case Study Using the Actor Network Theory Perspective

Abstract

Internationalization is a growing area in world-wide higher education. In order for local and international students to develop into responsible global citizens, they need to interact while they are on the university campus together. With the aim of facilitating local and international student interaction, a Facebook Page was set up by the international office at a university. The page was monitored over a two and a half year period to see what types of interactions would occur and Actor Network Theory was used as the main, high level lens for analyzing these interactions. The page showed evidence in the page posts that key stakeholders were interacting with each other online.

Socio-Technical Systems: Using Actor-Network Theory to Make the Social More Tangible in a Technical Space

“…Overall, a majority of the review articles confirmed the existence of the key ANT components found in the proposed framework (green coloured) and were generally aligned with the proposed sequencing of these components. Furthermore, the review revealed the existence of additional socio-technical dynamics such as de-enrolment [61]; re-problematisation [61,70]; competing problematisations [11,65,68]; ongoing problematisations [44]; focal actors as OPPs [70,77]; and allies [66], all of which were beyond the scope of this study.…”

“…Nineteen per cent of the case studies involved problems and solutions that are specific to information technology [60,62,71,73,76]. Other case studies were related to privatisation [64], technology infrastructure [67,77], higher education management [11,74], forestry [68], online user authenticity [72], intellectual capital [70], and technology usage [66]. These concepts might not be immediately relevant to the tools and techniques associated with industrial engineers; however, the processes in these fields could be suitable for engineering science.…”

“…The review articles introduced concepts such as unknown actors [66] and isolated actors [62]. In addition, the studies placed a notable emphasis on an actor's interest [5, 6, 11, 44, 45, 60, 61, 63-65, 74, 75, 77].…”

“…A need to facilitate internationalisation by promoting interaction between university stakeholders [66] Implementation of a Facebook page to facilitate online interaction 12 Identification of security gaps in the Wi-Fi standards [67] Rollout of WAPI (wireless LAN authentication and privacy infrastructure) 13 Land licensees were concerned about the increasing pressures imposed by government goals [68] Rollout of licensee-endorsed productionorientated vision for forest management 14 Conflicts at the interface between organisation hierarchy and project management (PM) structures (two case studies) [69] Achieve PM deliverables while managing the interface between PM structures and an organisation's hierarchy 15 A need to measure intellectual capital (IC) [70] Implementation of a model that enables IC measurement and reporting 16…”