مرکز منطقه ای اطلاع رساني علوم و فناوري - The Information Reliability on Social Networking Sites: Comparisons between Undergrad Grad and between Everyday Academic Information Grad-Undergrad Everyday-Academic

Abstract :

Online social networking sites (SNS) have become very popular as well as being one of the main information sources especially for the communication. The improvements of the Internet tools and enhanced technologies on mobile devices lead to an increase on the number of users of SNS. The uncontrolled information on SNS spreads out quickly, and thus it leads to some problems about reliability of the information. The main purpose of this study is to investigate the reliability criteria of students when they experience with daily and academic information on SNS. The second purpose of the study is to point out how the reliability criteria of undergraduate and graduate students differed from each other. The participants of this case study are 11 last year undergraduate students and 11 graduate students from the department of Computer Education and Instructional Technologies. Data were collected via semi-structured interviews with volunteers from both graduate and undergraduate program. The criteria that are found via qualitative analysis are mainly related to the information reliability on existing literature. In addition to these common reliability criteria, new main and sub reliability criteria were found. In this study, reliability criteria of users, namely consistency, authority, topicality, objectivity, official sources, original sources and majority (popularity), were found and discussed.