Facebook, crowdsourcing and the transition to college

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding of how college students connect online prior to their first year. Before students ever set foot on a college campus, they are making friends, joining clubs, locating activities, finding roommates and discussing future student activities all through the social network site, Facebook. Anticipatory socialisation theory frames this research to focus on the social, academic and career aspects of the transition. A case study approach and content analysis methodology sought to better understand frequent topics and themes for pre-college students. The primary foci of the pre-college Facebook interactions were connectivity and commonality among new students. An unintended finding was the discovery of crowdsourcing on post-secondary social media sites. Crowdsourcing taps into the collective intelligence of the public to complete tasks that an organisation would normally either perform itself or contract to a third-party provider; hence, outsourcing to a crowd. In this case, the crowd is comprised of pre-college students about to start their first year of post-secondary education.

Keywords:

• Facebook
• college
• university
• transition
• higher education
• crowdsourcing